From: Claus Färber (list-ietf-wg-apps-usefor@faerber.muc.de)
Date: Mon Aug 12 2002 - 06:17:00 CDT
Erland Sommarskog <sommar-usefor@algonet.se> schrieb/wrote:
> =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Claus_F=E4rber?= (list-ietf-wg-apps-usefor@faerber.muc.de) writes:
>> Backwards compatible does not mean that leagacy user agents are able to
>> display newsgroup names correctly (they can't with UTF-8 either).
>> Backwards compatible does mean that they can:
>> . access the newsgroup,
>> . create new postings, and
>> . create followups
>> without crashing or creating corrupted messages.
> A lie does not become more true because it is repeated all over again.
So you are explicitly claiming that if newsgroups are encoded with a
Punycode-like encoding (which only uses characters currently allowed in
newsgroup names), existing software will not be able:
. access the newsgroup,
. create new postings, and
. create followups
But UTF-8 does solve that problem in your opinion, although we know of
existing software that does produce the "funniest" results.
> That is indifference to the RFC2047 maniacs that touts RFC2047 as
> fully backwards compatible with existing software. It doesn't
> matter how many times you repeat that marketing drivel of a lie:
> it will never become true.
So you are claiming that leagacy software has problems handling mail
that has some RFC 2047-encoded phrases in it?
> Before RFC2047, reading mail with 8-bit characters with mailx never
> was a problems. Most of the time the mail got through untouched.
> Sometimes the high bit was stripped, and sometimes the sender had
> use CP850 or some MAC charset. But that was easier to read than the
> encodings introduced by RFC2047.
This is only true with languages using scripts where most characters are
found in ASCII (most Western European languages).
With other scripts, choosing the wrong charset for display makes
everything completly unreadable. This becomes especially problematic in
environments where there are multiple charsets to encode a script, for
example the situation for Cyrillic messages was a complete mess.
> Your blathering about crashing software shows that you have not under-
> stood what mail and news is good for: mail and news are good for
> communication between humans.
So it does not matter if software used by humans crashes or directs
messages to the wrong destination (or /dev/null).
> Encodings like QP or RCC2047 that makes the message more difficult to
> read, hampers that communications. Encodings like Base-64 or Punycode
> which completely hides the message destroys communication.
This shows that you have never had a look at Punycode. Punycode encodes
ASCII characters as-is, so for most Western languages the words *are*
quite readable. For most non-Western languages, which traditionally
don't use UTF-8, there's not much difference between UTF-8 and Punycode.
Claus
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