Re: UTF-8 over RFC 2047 (Re: Call for Usefor to recharter)

["D. J. Bernstein" <djb@xxxxxxxx>]

Keith Moore writes:
> I don't share your confidence that this happens in every environment,
> for every program that generates header fields.

That isn't your problem. If you want C-normalized text on the wire,
specify C-normalized text on the wire. You don't need to know whether
software accomplishes this by having text C-normalized in the keyboard
interface (as everyone does now) or in the MUA (which would work too).

> > Anyway, your hypothetical Unicode normalization problems would also
> > arise in normalizing RFC 2047, so you can't use normalization as an
> > argument against moving to UTF-8.
> Which is precisely why 2047 was never intended for anything that needs
> to be interpreted by machine.

Even with that (shortsighted) restriction, RFC 2047 was badly designed.
For example, you should have declared encoding in a separate header
field, not by inserting bytes into existing header fields. You should
have required 8-bit-clean software in 1991; pandering to 7-bit software
was a huge mistake. You should have required UTF-8 support in 1994. You
should have required UTF-8 as a default in 1998.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago