Re: lynx-dev HTML4.0 and default charset

[David Woolley]

> Some people love to hate "MIME", apparently often without knowing what
> it is - they take their pet peeve and say it's all the fault of some

Let's be clear.  I'm in favour of the use of MIME in HTTP, but I
can see that the short term pressures on the people who run the short
term businesses called ISP, could well require them to bow to user
prejudices.  Most commercial organisations try to minimise complaints,
rather than do things properly.

In addition, allowing users to set proper meta data can add to the costs
of securing the system.

> Eventually this will be decided by non-technical factors.  If there's enough
> demand for an *international* *W*WW to exist and for sites to interoperate

Having watched the internet over a few years, I have reservations that
more than a few people want this.  USENET started off being for academics
who often took a world view, but many parts of it have degraded into
chauvinist cliques as it has moved to a mass market.  The web was also
started by academics, but has been taken over by a mix of businesses,
with primary markets in the USA, and vanity publishers.  People with a
real desire to inform are in the minority.  (US businesses are well known
in Europe for their parochialism, e.g. using 800 numbers with no
international alternative.)

The one hopeful sign I sense is that I think the 20s male dominance of
the earlier commercial internet has reduced and for example the teenage
daughters of some of my workmates are using it to communicate with pen
friends and tend to much more likely to think globally.  However they
tend not to be content providers, or, for that matter Lynx users.

Longer term, Unicode might be a more likely solution, but at the expense
of increased resource requirements in the network and servers, although
good compression algorithms should compress UTF-8 or Unicode better than
more efficient codes.  Unicode will raise similar objections to MIME.

(Note that while I consider character set labelling and reliable 8 bit
transfer benefits of MIME, I don't consider its use for HTML and 
multipart/alternate mail to be true progress - the tendency is for
people to complain that you are not keeping up with progress if you 
object to the latter, but also complain that they are being imposed upon
if forced to do the former properly.)