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

>>> He who knowingly generates a UTF-8 header would be responsible for 
>>> ensuring that the "Foobar" header was added, if not already present. 
>>> IOW, those who want to use this new-fangled UTF-8 stuff would be the 
>>> ones to bear the cost.
>>
>> that's missing the point.  adding an extra field is easy, making sure 
>> that all non-ascii text that is in the header is in utf-8 at the time 
>> that that field is added is hard. making sure that any nonascii text 
>> that is subsequently added by other agents is also in utf-8 is 
>> impossible.
>
> No, the proposal is for a standard which says all Non-ASCII in headers 
> MUST be in UTF-8 (well, you can still use RFC 2047 if you really need 
> more flexibility). So if anyone includes other charsets naked in a set 
> of headers that contains the Foobar header, then he is con-compliant 
> (as is anybody who uses even UTF-8 without Foobar).

the question is not whether an implementation that used some other 
charset without encoding it would violate the standard.  the question 
is whether this would work well in practice given that various other 
charsets are already being used without encoding, and also given that 
even within the same header field different bits of text can come from 
different places and be in different charsets.

as for the extra header, I suspect it would be about as useless as 
MIME-Version.

> He who generates non-compliant messages must put up with the 
> consequences (and that includes anyone who invents some local variant 
> of the Foobar header allowing other charsets, if his message escapes 
> from his local environment).
> .
>>
>>> Indeed it is already happening, except that the code used is usually 
>>> not UTF-8.
>>
>> which is exactly why tagging the entire header as either being utf-8 
>> or not doesn't work.
>
> Which is exactly why allowing the header to be tagged as being in 
> UTF-8 *might* just encourage them to change their ways, because I 
> don't see anything else that will stop the rot.

I don't see how adding more rot is going to stop the existing rot.