From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Mar 18 2002 - 05:56:20 CST
In <2KTs0RFJ+gk8IAGX@pillar.turnpike.com> Ian Bell <ianbell@turnpike.com> writes:
>On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
>>Well does any Mail system actually implement RFC 2231?
>Turnpike does.
Fair enough. But has anyone actually seen one in the wild?
What I cannot understand is why they did not update RFC 2047 so as to
allow it is be used in parameters. There must be lots of software out
there that understands RFC 2047, but does not understand RFC 2231.
But that is all water under the bridge, I suppose.
>> Similar considerations apply to non-ASCII characters within the
>> values of parameters (which, according to the syntax, MUST be in the
>> form of quoted-strings in order for UTF8-xtra-chars to be
>> accomodated). There is NO requirement to support the extensions set
>> out in [RFC 2231] for specifying continuations, character sets or
>> languages in such values, though reading agents MAY support them.
>>
>>Is that OK?
>No, MIME is not USEFOR's to change. 8bit characters in MIME headers
>should not be allowed until MIME is extended to allow it.
>So clients MAY implement RFC2231, but if they want to send 8bit
>characters in MIME parameters with the Content-Type or
>Content-Disposition headers, they MUST use it.
But I see no reason for a MUST.
Currently, all our headers are 8-bit clean, using UTF-8. So we allow
Newsgroups: dk.test.utf8-æøå
Subject: test message to dk.test.utf8-æøå
(I manually inserted a charset=utf-8 in this nessage so you could see
those; hope it works).
So why not
Archive: yes; filename = "dk/test/utf8-æøå"
(or similar stuff in a Content-Disposition header)?
Essentially, we should treat it the same as we do RFC 2047. So I have now
modified my NOTE as follows.
Similar considerations apply to non-ASCII characters within the
values of parameters (which, according to the syntax, MUST be in the
form of quoted-strings in order for UTF8-xtra-chars to be
accomodated). Such values MAY be encoded using the MIME mechanism
defined in [RFC 2231], but this usage is deprecated within news
articles (even though it is required in email messages) since it is
less legible in older reading agents which support neither it nor
UTF-8. Nevertheless, reading agents SHOULD support this usage.
That is EXACTLY the same as we say for RFC 2047 in Netnews headers. I will
make a suitable remark in the section on gateways when I get there.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5