On Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:46:34 +0100, Peter J Ross <pjr@example.invalid>
wrote in :

>Rubbish. Welsh and "Scottish" (by which you mean Gaelic/Gáidhlig) can
>be transferred witrh NNTP (and SMTP) perfectly well in ASCII thanks to
>MIME. So can French, German, Hebrew, Chinese, Greek...

So can images, executable program code and all those other things that
are traditionally considered 'binary' on netnews. Indeed, the ancient
and traditional uuencode that has been used since before MIME or the web
to transfer 'binaries' uses only ASCII - that is the whole point of it.

Having a transfer encoding that uses only ASCII has never been a
distinguishing characteristic of "not binary" in the sense that "binary"
is used in netnews.

-- 
Owen Rees
[one of] my preferred email address[es] and more stuff can be
found at <http://www.users.waitrose.com/~owenrees/index.html>