Re: First strawman for UTF-8 headers proposal

Keith Moore <[email protected]> writes:

> Again, I really don't think having UTF-8 headers puts us much closer
> to a solution to the problem at hand - which is to allow multiple
> representations of addresses in different languages and scripts.  (to
> which I might add -- without significant disruption of the mail
> system).   At best, providing unencoded UTF-8 headers would be
> orthogonal to a solution to the problem - actually I suspect it would
> impede adoption of a solution.

Could you define the problem you are thinking of here, more closely?
Being able to send UTF-8 in headers, after "fixing" SMTP, POP3 etc,
between aware applications, would appear to give me non-ASCII e-mail
addresses (and also get rid of RFC 2047, which is a nice side effect).
If this can be made to work, it would solve my internationalization
needs for e-mail, but it sounds as if it wouldn't satisfy your needs.

You say you want multiple representations of addresses in different
languages and scripts.  Is the "multiple" a goal in itself, that must
be present at the protocol level?  Why do you want to support multiple
scripts?  What is missing from Unicode, that warrant the added
complexities of character set tagging of data?  Applications on
non-Unicode platforms can convert to and from their native encoding.

As for language tagging, I'm not sure I see the benefits from language
tagging e-mail addresses.  They are normally treated by humans as
identifiers.  However, it wouldn't be difficult to add a language tag
to the UTF-8 strings.  I wonder if this is a critical feature though.
There are many human languages that use ASCII or trivial extensions of
ASCII (e.g., most European languages), and language tagging ASCII
strings in headers isn't a popular request, even though e-mail has
been in use in those languages for years.  So I agree with the other
people earlier in this thread, who suggested language tagging in RFC
2047 isn't critical to the problem discussed here.

Language tagging sounds like over-engineering to me, at this point.
Let's support UTF-8 directly first.  If users come screaming for
language tagging, it can be added.  Unless, of course, someone can
provide more insight as to why language tagging is critical to
non-ASCII e-mail addresses...

Thanks,
Simon