From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Tue Mar 19 2002 - 12:54:53 CST
Bruce Lilly wrote:
>
> 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.
This raises another issue: 2047's encoding applies to the display
name part of a mailbox (a phrase) and to the Subject header (an
unstructured field), but not to the Newsgroups header (since it
is not unstructured, comments are disallowed, and the content
isn't defined as a phrase. That leaves open the method for
encoding newsgroups containing UTF-8 characters when sending
email (when posting and mailing, when following up to the
poster, or when gatewaying from news to mail). 2231 is not
applicable either; there doesn't seem to be any existing RFC that
covers the situation. About the closest would probably be 2396,
which would cover news:// URIs, and which encodes non-ASCII
octets as %xx where xx represents two case-insensitive hexadecimal
digits.