Use of 8: headers

Glad to see this being discussed more heavily. Adam's "8:" proposal 
is interesting and easy to describe. However, I think Martin has 
brought up a good point:

At 4:41 PM -0500 12/31/03, Martin Duerst wrote:
>I definitely like a header much more than the 8: header prefix
>proposal, because it looks to me that it is much more straight-
>forward to implement. There are no issues such as "what happens
>if there is a To: and an 8:To: header?", and 8-bit-clean software
>can just work on headers without having to care about 7-bit/8-bit
>issues except at very specific points (downgrading/upgrading).

Comments on this balance are most welcome!

>>Header-Transfer-Encoding : "Header-Transfer-Encoding:" ( "8bit" / "7bit" )
>>                                *( ";" parameter )
>>
>>OK, it needs CFWS and all that jazz in the proper places. We can argue
>>later whether the operative keyword is "8bit" or "utf-8".
>
>Allow me to start now: I think the name "Header-Transfer-Encoding"
>is problematic, because it will further increase confusion about
>the various encoding layers. Second, I very much think the
>distinction should be between US-ASCII and UTF-8, not 8bit and 7bit.

Martin is correct. If we go with a new "flagging" header, it could 
simply be "Has-UTF-8-headers: yes".

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium