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

At 15:55 04/01/01 -0500, Keith Moore wrote:

> > At another level, if there is a
> > specification that says "if you add 8bit header content, it must
> > be UTF-8; anything else must either be converted into RFC 2047
> > form or must be converted to UTF-8", then we are probably ok.
>
>well, we already have widespread practice of taking rfc 2047 and
>decoding it into whatever charset the MUA happens to want to use -
>mixing utf-8 with that probably produces unpredictable results,
>and insisting that all non-tagged non-ASCII text is utf-8 is probably
>just naive.

This is an interesting point. But it doesn't exactly work that way.
There are MUAs that can handle only one charset, or a few very
related ones (I still use such a beast, but I'm thinking hard
about how to get rid of it). Those won't feel very well with UTF-8,
but they also won't feel well with IDNA, and a few other things.
The MUAs that can handle a wide variety of encodings will just
use Unicode inside. Being able to handle something like
    Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?...?= =?iso-2022-jp?B?...?=
in a way that the user can actually look at means using
Unicode (or it means using some very messy code that would get a
lot easier if they switched to Unicode).


>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.

Others have discussed the first part of this paragraph.
For the second part (from the "it's only"), I think the
'some confidence' and 'even less experience' is a clear
understatement if the 'we' means the overall Internet or
IT community.


Regards,    Martin.