Re: a few short notes

At 11:55 04/02/01 -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

>middle ground: there are some headers that are intended for consumption by 
>computers where ISO-8859-1 or some similar format is acceptable, which I 
>think solves your issues, but there are other headers, primarily those 
>dealing with the PERSON, as opposed to the server or the transport, where 
>we can't make these kinds of limitations.

I very much hope that we can avoid the mistake to use iso-8859-1.
It's a "middle ground", but in a bad sense. It does not give
enough functionality (i.e. enough characters), but eats up the
whole 8-bit space. For something global, it's a total dead end.


>I think we need to, for instance, come up with a single term that defines 
>"Message Subject", and there's no reason why that can't be represented 
>internally in 8859-1.

For the names of header fields (i.e. Subject:, From:, Date:,...),
or whatever will be the equivalent in a new protocol, US-ASCII is
enough. Nothing more is needed. Of course, these can/should be
converted to more understandable labels in the language of the
user by user interfaces. For the values of most of these
fields (e.g. except Date:,...), iso-8859-1 is by way not enough.


Regards,    Martin.