Re: Can we back up a bit and ask some basic questions?Analternate model

[Martin Duerst <duerst@xxxxxx>]

At 22:18 03/02/15 +0000, Roy Badami wrote:

> I have to say that I don't believe coding efficiency is incredibly
> important to e-mail, particularly coding efficiently of addresses
> (except insofar as we need to allow useful IMAs within existing
> protocols that contain length restrictions).
>
> The main reason why I think this will inevitably happen in the future
> (regardless of whether this forum mandates it) is that in the long
> term we will move to a message body which (by default) is just a block
> of UTF-8,

I think this is the direction we are moving to, but not very
quickly. Similar for the WWW, we are seeing more and more UTF-8,
but again, not extremely quickly.


> with no requirements for special coding in any headers or in
> the body.

Something like Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
will be present for a VERY long time. But maybe that's
not what you mean by encoding.


> Once this happens, and punycode is unnecessary within the
> message, it would seem to me to make sence to eliminate it from
> (2)821, too.

I think this is one way to argue, but a) I don't think there
is any plan for using ACE explicitly within the message body
(it can always be used, but it will be just a random sequence
of ASCII letters); b) The motivation for uniform encoding
is much stronger in the headers than in the body (I'm very
happy that nobody has brought up proposals yet for using
a variety of legacy encodings, with labeling, in the header);
c) If we think we have a good feel about where we are going,
then it may be a lot cheaper to try to go there faster and
on the most direct way we can find rather than waste time.


Regards,   Martin.