From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Wed Jan 22 2003 - 09:15:05 CST
Charles Lindsey wrote:
>Currently, the policy of this WG following the straw poll is to stick
>with UTF-8 in headers (in addition to the possibility of using RFC
>2047/2231), but to ensure that any article sent by email (especially to
>moderators) is transformed into a compliant Email message.
>
>In spite of much recent discussion on the ietf-822 list, and here,
>I hear no great pressure from the members of this WG to change that
>established policy.
>[...]
>Is this satisfactory? If so, I will proceed with the various
>consequential changes elsewhere in the document.
>
>
It is unsatisfactory. The clear outcome of the discussions on ietf-822 is
that unless the substantive objections to the current draft are adequately
resolved, the draft will be dead-on-arrival at the IETF. This objections,
which are not adequately addressed by the proposed change include:
1. The draft is incompatible with the MIME standards (no untagged unencoded
8-bit content in message header fields or in MIME-part header fields,
including all message and multipart media types).
2. The use of raw untagged utf-8 in MIME messages fails to comply with the
language-tagging requirements for internationalization in RFC 2277,
which
must be adhered to in a standards-track RFC, and a standards-track
RFC is
what the Usefor WG charter calls for.
3. There is no backwards compatibility with the installed base of
software which
is compliant with RFC 1036, including UAs, gateways, etc.
4. Compatibility (as exists under RFC 1036) would be broken with
interoperating
protocols including IMAP and SMTP.
5. Provision of two alternative mechanisms (raw untagged utf-8 and MIME
(RFC 2047/2231))
for the same purpose is a dubious practice.
In addition, the proposed change does not address the following
additional objections:
6. The draft requires modification of non-trace header fields, which is
incompatible
with message signing. Without specifying details of sigining
implementation, the
draft needs to be compatible with signing methods currently in use
(e.g. S/MIME)
or likely to be used, and non-trace field modification is not
compatible with those
methods.
7. The use of raw utf-8 is incompatible with administrative tools such
as grep (examples
include matching with . and ?).
8. The draft provides no means of moderation of extended newsgroups
which is both acceptable
to moderators and compatible with the existing installed base of RFC
1036-compliant UAs
and gateways.
In accordance with The Goal of the Usefor WG charter, these objections
need to
be addressed, and the "policy" of raw untagged utf-8 in header fields is
incompatible
with that Goal and charter (properly MIME-tagged and encoded utf-8 is OK).
>2. Concern has been expressed concerning existing gateways from news to
>email (note that these invariably are for the purpose of gatewaying a
>particular newsgroup into a particular mailing list
>
It has been claimed that moderation is another use of such gateways, and
moderation
is an essential practice that needs to be addressed in a manner which is
both acceptable
to moderators and compatible with the existing installed base of RFC
1036-compliant
UAs and gateways.