From: Claus Färber (list-ietf-wg-apps-usefor@faerber.muc.de)
Date: Mon Aug 26 2002 - 18:45:00 CDT
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> schrieb/wrote:
> To be fully compliant with out draft, newsreaders MUST be able to handle
> both UTF-8 and RFC 2047 (i.e. in a sensible fashion - they may not all be
> able to display the more obscure charsets).
So what do we gain from introducing raw UTF-8?
. Users of leagacy newsreaders can decide wheter they want to see "new"
or "old" style posts correctly by changing their terminal settings (if
their terminal supports UTF-8, which is unlikely if their system
administrator did not update the Usenet software to support RFC 2047
either).
But on the other hand:
. Existing newsreaders that support RFC 2047 and leagacy charsets won't
be able to switch the charset automatically.
(We *will* see a mix of UTF-8 and leagacy charsets in most hierarchies
in the transition period -- unless there is no transition period
because the new standard is just ignored.)
. Gating to the mail world becomes more difficult; some existing gates
may break completly.
. New newsreaders will have to implement RFC 2047 anyway.
In other words: Raw UTF-8 in headers would have been a nice solution but
introducing it now -- over ten years after RFC 1342 became Proposed
Standard (current version is RFC 2047) -- does not yield sufficient
benefits:
In order to cater for some users using a non-RFC-2047 compliant software
in a UTF-8-enabled environment we break things for the much larger
number of users which already use RFC-2047-enabled newsreaders.
Claus
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