From: Jean-Marc Desperrier (jean-marc.desperrier@certplus.com)
Date: Mon Jul 16 2001 - 08:55:25 CDT
sommar@kairos.kairos.algonet.se wrote:
> There is no way that a followup agent safely can convert this to UTF-8.
Sorry, I wasn't following the fact you were talking about followup agent.
What experience do you have with followup agent modifying subject ?
I think most standard agent wont't change anything, and those who will are beyond
any hope of enhancement.
I don't agree with your assertion that raw 8 bit seldom causes difficulties.
It works only when everyone communicating uses the same locale.
I've been confronted to context where people who have different; non-US locale try
to communicate, and it causes lot of problem.
I'm worried about the situation after USEFOR gets approved where there will be a
mix between utf-8 encoded messages, and raw eight bit messages.
The programs that don't understand RFC 2047 now will not adapt to UTF-8 either
(within any short time frame at least).
I think we will have basically the following situation :
- RFC 2047 unable, utf-8 unable programms
- RFC 2047 able, utf-8 unable programms
- RFC 2047 able, utf-8 able proagrme
That why I think that the use of RFC 2047 encoded headers instead of switching
directly to utf-8 of would be a better upgrade path for most user agent (and when
posting in a group where the group name does not contain any 8 bit character),
because the number of people who can read it will be, at first, higher.
Paragraph 3.1
o The use of the UTF-8 charset for headers will not affect any
existing _official_ usage, since US-ASCII is a strict subset of UTF-8.
We all know there's an unofficial usage of sending 8 bit in some locale, and we
know USEFOR will affect _that_ use.
I think there should be a note like this :
Note : As there has been unofficial and undocumented use in headers fields of pure
8 bit in various local encodings before the advent of this standard, some
newsreaders might choose to try to display illegal utf-8 sequence in the headers as
character in the local encoding, as far as they are able to adequetaly determine
local encoding. This should enable newsreaders respecting USEFOR standard to
interpret messages sent by newsreaders that do not respect it, because the
redondancy of utf-8 garanties that the probablility of non-utf8 sequence to be
legal utf-8 is very low.
This kind of behaviour is needed for compatibility with current usage, and how to
adapt to this current usage should be described to help implementors of
newsreaders.