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The following suggestions are often presented as being solutions:
Why not use a decode table as a pointer into Telnet client?
or
Our browser has a decode table, therefore we have solved the problem this way.
or
We have proxy channel for that internet service, it decodes automatically.
If you consider this a little deeper, you will see that it will not always work... If you utilize this solution, a decode table or proxy would have to exist in each and every interactive Internet service, i.e. telnet, news, gopher, finger, wais, HTTP, ftp, etc. Even if you cover all standard Internet services by proxy channels or decode tables, you will be hitted by any newly appeared service, f.e. varions multi-user conferencing tools. Lots of such services grows up nowdays.
The disadvantages of decode tables method soon become very obvious, because most of the existing applications don't support decode tables. That is, you would have to restrict the user to a your particular WWW browser with a particular decode table, however many very good browsers are in existence, so it would be a very unwise and confining restriction. Of course you could contact each and every software author and try to convince him to support your decode table, but ... good luck with doing that!
The disadvantages of proxy method becomes obvious too, because you can
cover only few old, well-know and stable internet services and can't
deal with others.
You need to program and debug separate proxy for each service.
There is some bottlenecks even for known services proxing such as HTTP,
f.e. most proxies not removes
<META ... charset=...> fragments from
<HEAD> section. It not cause any harm for
browsers which follows standard (HTTP header charset
overwrites META charset), but can badly damage decoding for browsers which
are broken and do just opposite thing like Netscape and MS Explorer.
I think the easiest and most realistic way to solve this problem is to have two character sets installed, CP1251 and KOI8-R, and then switch between them. People who disagree with this approach often say:
But you need a program to convert between two charsets!
Well, of course you do! But you need such a program in either case, i.e. you receive a binary attachment which is text in KOI8-R: no decode table helps you in this case. But in my variant (you have KOI8-R fonts installed too) you can read, edit, cut & paste such documents easily!
Better English variant of this section provided by Steve Van Osdell <svanos@cdc.net>, thanx to him.
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