From: Bernie Cosell (bernie@fantasyfarm.com)
Date: Wed Jul 31 2002 - 13:26:10 CDT
On 31 Jul 2002 at 10:51, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> Shmuel (Seymour J ) Metz <Shmuel+gen@patriot.net> writes:
> > Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> said:
>
> >> Non sequitur. RFC 2822 does not specify the contents of non-mail
> >> headers such as Newsgroups.
>
> > That ceases to be true once you gate the news to mail, e.g., for
> > moderation.
>
> No, I'm sorry, you're wrong. The only thing that RFC 2822 specifies is
> that all headers must be encoded into a 7-bit ASCII form for transport.
> The nature of that encoding for headers not specified as part of mail is
> not constrained.
But the thing that continues to strike me in this discussion is that email
*SURELY* needs to embrace better-than-7-bit headers,
beyond the obvious things like being able to properly put in their
'organization' and other such [including, as per the current discussion,
'newsgroups:] but more broadely, for example, for email addresses [surely folks
would like to be able to have things like "andré@myhost.in.fr" for their email
addresses???]
Doesn't it behoove them to find a *uniform* and sensible way to do that [either
by permitting 8-bit or specifying a standarized encoding] so that folks can
write mail clients and servers and such? The notion of every mail system and
mail client basically 'rolling its own' for how *IT* encodes its UTF-8 or
whatever stuff into the email headers seems like it'll lead to chaos.
and so I'm again surprised that usenet is "in the lead" on this one, since it
is a problem that not only would I think that the email folk need to solve, but
I'd have thought that they would've needed it solved *first*...
> The only reason why we would have to deviate or encapsulate is if people
> consider it absolutely unacceptable to take the same approach that mail
> has taken and use a 7-bit encoding. This is, in fact, one of the major
> points of contention on this list.
my quandry, also. *GIVEN* that there is some email-rule for putting better
than 8-bit stuff into email headers, why do we [as usenet folk] *CARE* what
that mechanism is? Right now there's a lot of synergy on the client side by
having news and email share a common format... it seems like it'd be a terrible
shame to lose that.
/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA
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