Re: Can we back up a bit and ask some basic questions?Analternate model

   >The main reason why I think this will inevitably happen in the future
   >(regardless of whether this forum mandates it) is that in the long
   >term we will move to a message body which (by default) is just a block
   >of UTF-8,

   I think this is the direction we are moving to, but not very
   quickly. Similar for the WWW, we are seeing more and more UTF-8,
   but again, not extremely quickly.

Sorry, there was a typo in my comment above.  I meant to say:

   we will move to a _message_ which (by default) is just a block of UTF-8

ie, not only will out content-transfer-encoding be 8-bit, but we'll
dispense with the escaping mechanism in subject and other headers.  At
this point it makes sense to dispense with the ACE in the headers,
too.  A message once again becomes just a piece of text you can view
(most of) in a text editor.


   >with no requirements for special coding in any headers or in
   >the body.

   Something like Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
   will be present for a VERY long time. But maybe that's
   not what you mean by encoding.

Indeed.  I meant that quoted-printable and base64 will go away, at
least for plain text.


   I think this is one way to argue, but a) I don't think there
   is any plan for using ACE explicitly within the message body
   (it can always be used, but it will be just a random sequence
   of ASCII letters); 

Sorry, I intended to refer to the entire message, where there is a
clear plan to use ACE.

   b) The motivation for uniform encoding is much stronger in the
   headers than in the body (I'm very happy that nobody has brought up
   proposals yet for using a variety of legacy encodings, with labeling,
   in the header);

Agreed.
  
   c) If we think we have a good feel about where we are
   going, then it may be a lot cheaper to try to go there faster and on
   the most direct way we can find rather than waste time.

Having thought about it further, the kind of solution I was
envisioning would have to wait for a new message format to be defined,
in which the headers were 8-bit.  Making this change just for
addresses doesn't make sense, and defining the native UTF-8 message
format is clearly outside the scope of the present discussions.

	-roy