Re: gnus should accept UTF8 even if UTF-8 is standard

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ted Zlatanov writes:

 > RS> Grep finished (matches found) at Wed Oct 15 23:58:55
 > 
 > It's a common usage, e.g. in locale names.  'UTF-8 is also common and
 > should be added.

It's intended to be a user convenience for typing to iconv and the
like.  It was introduced IIRC by glibc, comparing encoding names by
stripping out non-alphanumerics and canonicalizing case.  However,
internally Emacs should use the IANA registered names, and only use
aliases where one encoding has multiple names for some reason (are
there any?) or where one encoding is implemented as an alias to
another (binary and iso-8859-1-unix).

I agree that users should be allowed the convenience; this can be done
with a `read-mime-charset' or the like, which will determine what the
user wants and produce a canonical encoding name.  I see no good
reason for allowing it to programmers, who will probably spell it "u
M-/ 8" in any case.<wink>  If it's being seen in MIME headers, very
likely it's spam.  Responsible MUAs will use the names registered with
the IANA where available, but spammers tend to disregard RFCs the way
they disregard all other civilized usage.  Emacs should not emulate
them.