83

Chapter 10

the Internet

The Internet is a world wide network of computer. Thus the text data exchanged via the Internet

must be internationalized.

The concept of internationalization did not exist at the dawn of the Internet, since it was developed

in US. Protocols used in the Internet were developed to be upward compatible with the existing

protocols.

One of the key technology of the internationalization of the Internet data exchange is MIME.

10.1 Mail/News

Internet mail uses SMTP (RFC 821 (

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc821.html

)) and ESMTP

(RFC 1869 (

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1869.html

)) protocols. SMTP is 7bit protocol

and ESMTP is 8bit.

Original SMTP can only send ASCII characters. Thus non ASCII characters (ISO 8859 *, Asian

characters, and so on) have to be converted into ASCII characters.

MIME (RFC 2045 (

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2045.html

), 2046 (

http://www.faqs.

org/rfcs/rfc2046.html

), 2047 (

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2047.html

), 2048 (

http:

//www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2048.html

), and 2049 (

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2049.

html

)) deals with this problem.

At first RFC 2045 (

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2045.html

) determines three new head 

ers.

  MIME Version:

  Content Type: