From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Mar 19 2002 - 04:57:00 CST
In <3C96368C.A6D9C886@erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>Charles Lindsey wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>It's not clear which part of 2047 you are referring to. If
>you mean encoding of 8-bit characters in phrases, comments
>and unstructured text fields for display, strictly speaking that
>doesn't apply to parameters, since a parameter isn't a phrase
>(in the RFC 822 sense), comment, or unstructured field.
What I meant was that it would have been simpler to extend RFC 2047 to
allow it to apply to parameters in addition to phrases, comments, etc.
Indeed, some software erroneously does jus that (see my reply to Eric
Hall).
>The particular parts of 2231 that are likely to be of importance
>are the continuation of parameters, since that permits values
>longer than the recommended 78 character line length (and that
>has implications for the character set of unquoted parameters),
>and the ability to specify a charset, which would cover use of
>various national character sets and UTF-8.
I think it is mainly the charset. We have not been so insistent on
enforcing a 78 (or 79 in our case) limit on headers, perhaps because we
have all suffered long Newsgroups and Path lines for as long as we can
remember :-( . So the 998 limit is a MUST, but anything less is mostly
just Ought.
>[...]
>> So why not
>>
>> Archive: yes; filename = "dk/test/utf8-æøå"
>>
>> (or similar stuff in a Content-Disposition header)?
>Filenames can be tricky; not all systems support filenames
>with 8-bit characters, and there is some potential for
>mischief. That aside, the MIME-compliant 2231
>equivalent might be:
Actually, most UNIX systems plus NT-derived systems have no problem, which
is why that particular newsgroup already seems to propagate as well as any
normal group.
> Archive: yes; filename* = "utf-8'dk'dk/test/utf8-%c3%a6%c3%b8%c3%b5"
Yes, my current wording says that is a SHOULD accept and MAY (but
deprecated) generate. Use of raw UTF-8 in that context is already covered
by our syntax. I still need to say something about gateways (and for RFC
2047 too).
-- 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