Re: UUCP, etc., and SMTP/822/MIME mail (was: Re: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-utf8headers-00.txt)

On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 08:35:24PM -0800, [email protected] wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 03:24:59PM -0800, [email protected] wrote:
> > >
> > > > > We _could_ have adopted a rigid, Unicode-only, rule a decade ago
> > > > > rather than doing charset-specific tagging in text content types
> > > > > and 2047 encodings.
> > >
> > > > IIRC, unicode wasn't known to be stable at that time.  it certainly
> > > > wasn't widely adopted, and it's hard to imagine that we could have
> > > > gotten consensus on such a rule.  it's only after 10 years' experience
> > > > with unicode that we have some confidence in its character repertoire,
> > > > and we have even less experience with other aspects of it.
> > >
> > > A decade ago isn't a particularly relevant date in the development of MIME --
> > > at that point in time MIME was already a draft standard, making such a change
> > > quite difficult to make.
> > >
> > > A much more relevant date is November 18-22, 1991. This is the date of the last
> > > IETF meeting prior to the approval of MIME as a proposed standard.
> > > Realistically, this was the last point in time at which a change as major as
> > > uncategorical endorsement of a single, universal charset  specification could
> > > have been made. The actual MIME specifications were subsequently submitted to
> > > the IESG for approval in January 1992.
> > >
> > > According to the Unicode web site the complete specification of Unicode 1.0
> > > wasn't published until June, 1992. (Amusingly enough, that was the same month
> > > in which RFC 1341 appeared.) In November 1991 the universal charset situation
> > > was far from clear: What what then called 10646 seemed to be on the way
> > > out and Unicode seemed to be on the way in but no conclusions had been reached.
> 
> > Well, we could have built MIME on ISO 10646, and indeed the character
> > set support in MIME was built on 10646 as the reference character set,
> > as is also indicated by RFC 1345, which is the MIME related RFC that
> > made the ground for the charset definition.
> 
> Keld: Please reread my message. This was a complete nonstarter at the time; the
> 10646 draft in 1991 had failed its ballot and there was no clear indication of
> what it would turn into. Had we tried to move forward with a "just use 10646"
> solution the IESG at the time would have flat-out rejected MIME. And they would
> have been completely correct in doing so.

I am in complete agreement that we could only have done what we did at
that time, that is install a regime of multiple charsets, properly
labelled. 

I am not sure that we today should only go for UTF-8 for the
enhancements on email addresses, as UTF-8 as used in IETF specs is not
an international standard. We should probably then rather use what we
already did for names, and the functions to handle this is already
there. I also fear that just sending 8 bit will harm existing conforming
implementations.

Best regards
keld