From: Clive D.W. Feather (clive@demon.net)
Date: Sun Aug 04 2002 - 15:19:31 CDT
Bernie Cosell said:
> But the thing that continues to strike me in this discussion is that email
> *SURELY* needs to embrace better-than-7-bit headers,
[...]
Yes, but they're scared of sendmail and its legacy position of mangling the
top bit. That biases *everything*. News has been 8-bit-clean since the year
dot.
> *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?
Basically, the problem is that it's not trivial to encode or decode, and
the same string has multiple encoded forms. For email, which is mostly
one-to-one, this isn't that bad a problem. For news, where fast comparison
of strings (particularly newsgroup names) is important (because of the
sheer bulk that *each * major server needs to handle), this is serious.
Furthermore, you need something compatible with the present news
infrastructure, which restricts things as well.
-- Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <clive@demon.net> | Tel: +44 20 8371 1138 Internet Expert | Home: <clive@davros.org> | Fax: +44 870 051 9937 Demon Internet | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Mobile: +44 7973 377646 Thus plc | | NOTE: fax number change