From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Oct 07 2002 - 06:57:03 CDT
In <8YMbREYZcDB@3247.org> list-ietf-wg-apps-usefor@faerber.muc.de (Claus Färber) writes:
>Erland Sommarskog <sommar-usefor@algonet.se> schrieb/wrote:
>> The suggestion to use UTF-8 requires the effort to investigate, but
>> the result of the investigation is positive to a great extent.
>It was not. Only a very limited set of software products was tested and
>there have already been several failures.
>You have not tested more exotic server software.
What is "exotic server software"?
>You have not tested mail<->news gateways.
WHat sort of gateways? The usual sort is gateways to/from some mailing
list to some newsgroup. In that case, the Newsgroups-header is the one
thing that does not have to cross the interface (except for informational
purposes). Gateways are constructed for specialized purposes, so you
cannot "test" them in any uniform or useful manner.
>You have not tested submissions to moderated groups.
What is there to test? The 5.5.2 encoding is not rocket science, so there
is no doubt that it will work. And encapsulation is there as a last
resort.
What you have not mentioned is the posted-and-mailed situation, where the
requirements are more severe than for moderators (at least the moderator
is expecting news-like stuff, but the recipient of an emailed news article
is just an ordinary email user). So whatever works for posted-and-mailed
should also work for moderators.
And indeed we are doing experiments on that, in the "Subject æøå" thread.
What we need to find out is whether there are any UTF-8 constructs in news
that will not encode sensibly into 2047/2231. So far, the discussion in
that thread is indicating things are not so bad as I first supposed, but I
still have some worries.
And there is the matter of User-Agent. I have posted some suggestions on
that, but some feedback would be nice because it is certainly not
2047-proof as it currently stands in our draft. I think everything else
probably is.
-- 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