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

>> 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.

MUAs don't have to handle a wide variety of encodings in order to 
translate encodings that they do understand to a character encoding 
other than utf-8 and put *that* in the message header.

>> 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.

I disagree.  It has taken most of those 10 years to get enough software 
written and widely deployed enough to have a good sense of how well 
Unicode works.  The same would have been true for any other solution.