[Nmh-workers] Help: 8-bit: I'm confused and befuddled.

[norm]

I'm confused and befuddled. When people on this list talk about '8-bit' or 
'8bit", do they mean any character encoding that allows 8 bits per character, 
or do they mean some specific encoding?

Do they mean ISO 8859-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO-8859-1) or something 
else? Surely they don't mean UTF-8 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8), which, 
despite its name, allows 32 bits per character.

Maybe they mean 8-bit Mime, RFC 6162? As I read it, it just allows 8 bits per 
character and is silent about the encoding?

    Norman Shapiro