From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se)
Date: Mon Jul 16 2001 - 15:56:51 CDT
Jean-Marc Desperrier <jean-marc.desperrier@certplus.com> writes:
> 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.
As John mentioned MacSOUP changes unknown 8-bit to known RFC2047 encoding,
and MacSOUP was one of the first to receive the GKNSA seal. It is not
the only one in town that does this, I believe.
The newsreader that I use, Xnews, does the opposite. It replaces RFC2047
encoding with posting in pure 8-bit. While it makes the subject line
more readable, it does make life worse for agents not capable of RFC2047.
And Xnews is not the only to do so either.
> 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 would however be brave to claim that raw 8 bit is the solution that
gives least trouble. Of course, in context where everyone has only
RFC2047-capable readers but use different charsets, RFC2047 is better.
But in many groups the use of charset is homogeneous, whereas the mix
of newsreaders is not.
> 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.
But UTF-8 is by far a lesser evil than RFC2047, as it adds less amount of
noise. In a context where you use Latin script, I should hasten to add.
> The programs that don't understand RFC 2047 now will not adapt to UTF-8 either
> (within any short time frame at least).
Not entirely correct. It is certainly true for a popular reader like
Free Agent. However, I expect UTF-8 support for my mail reader long
before RFC2047 support. To wit, I use mailx in a Telnet window, and
all I need is UTF-8 support in my Telnet client.
> 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.
If it is non-utf8, then it is not legal UTF-8.
I could accept such a note, but as John pointed out, we have something
of the kind already.
And it does not really replace the NOTE I suggested for Subject. That
note is not about display, but leaving the subject line unchanged.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se