following the latest charset discussion, it came to my mind that it might be a nice idea, to promote the transition from legacy charsets to UTF-8 by editors automatically changing to charset on reply to UTF-8 for areas where UTF-8 seems to be acceptable. The idea is that this way to some extent tools with broad charset support convert the resulting threads at least partially for everybody else as long as UTF-8 support is not an issue for the readers.
Technically, the idea is to have a "preferred charset" setting per area and do the automatic transition only for messages where the destination area has this preference set to UTF-8. In some packages (like WP), this is probably a single line of code. For areas, where the audience is likely to use tools that cannot handle UTF-8, the area default may be set to something else (e.g., IBMPC) and no automatich charset change will happen. Currently, WP maintains the original message charset in replys (if it is supported by WP).
What do you think?
Best, Tim --- WinPoint 412.0 * Origin: Original WinPoint Origin! (2:240/1120.29)
