Re: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-utf8headers-00.txt

I would worry a bit that there may still be mailers out there that 
don't always convey all instances of a header field that appears more 
than once -- e.g. if they convert into, say, a database representation 
and can only have one value indexed to the field name "8", there might 
be information lost when that gets converted back into RFC [2]822 
format.  -- Nathaniel

On Saturday, December 27, 2003, at 05:21  PM, Adam M. Costello wrote:

>
> John C Klensin <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> While this idea is an interesting one in principle, the
>> particular proposal you make would break a very large fraction
>> of the RFC822/2822 parsers in the world, which assume
>>    Header = *C ":"
>> where "C" is an instance of a permitted character.
>
> Either I don't understand your objection, or I didn't make my proposal
> clear enough.
>
> The previous UTF-8-headers proposals have been redefining the syntax
> of existing fields (like From:, Subject:, etc.) to allow UTF-8.  I am
> suggesting creating a new field, 8: (which may appear multiple times),
> and allowing UTF-8 only inside 8:, and leaving existing field syntax
> unchanged.  Existing software, which does not recognize 8:, will not 
> try
> to interpret it (unrecognized fields are ignored).  New software that
> recognizes 8: will know that the first thing inside the contents of an
> 8: field is a sub-field-name, with the same semantics as a top-level
> field name, but with slightly different syntax beyond that (UTF-8 is
> allowed).
>
> The intention of this proposal is to make breakage less likely than it
> would be if UTF-8 were used directly inside today's standard fields
> (From:, To:, etc.).
>
> We can't expect existing parsers to understand non-ASCII fields, so
> the best we can do is try to hide the non-ASCII fields from them.  An
> SMTP extension keyword is one line of defense, but Charles Lindsey was
> concerned that it wouldn't be enough.  This new 8: field would serve as
> a second line of defense and as a convenient flag.
>
> AMC
>
>