From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 15:19:20 CDT
"Charles Lindsey" <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> In <yl7kkgxxvf.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
> >Something like:
>
> > It is recommended, as a last recourse, that characters in unknown
> > character sets be passed unaltered and displayed in the default
> > character set so long as they are not control characters in that
> > character set. This is better than altering or rejecting the
> > characters since the user will at least have some chance of making
> > sense of the text.
>
> Likewise ising "recommended" where "RECOMMENDED" might be (mis)understood.
> Better to keep such advice in a NOTE. I now have:
And so what? If the implementor who does not understand the fine difference
between lower and uppercase, and takes our words for good, fine.
If an IETF reviewer does not understand the difference, we just bang
him on the head with the approriate RFC in
> and they MAY, when it is detected that none of these has been used,
> attempt to interpet the header according to whatever other character
> set can be deduced, or has been configued as a default by the reader.
>
> NOTE: It is possible to determine, with a high degree of
> accuracy, when a given text containing octets with the 8th bit
> set was not encoded using UTF-8, and using this test to recover
> such non-compliant texts is therefore commended where no other
> harm could arise.
It still says MAY, which clearly signals to the implementor that he
can ignore it completely.
Just skip the MAY part, and make Russ's text into a note.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se