From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2003 - 00:53:40 CST
Since you all are talking about existing usage, I assume that you're
talking about all of the headers *other* than Newsgroups. I am therefore
addressing that point. The comments below do not apply to newsgroup
names, but to phrases in From, Subject headers, and similar things.
J B Moreno <planb@newsreaders.com> writes:
> I gave 3 options;
> 1. Bless using multiple 8 bit charsets
> 2. Forbid 8 bits
> 3. Bless a single 8 bit charset and try to get them to switch.
2 and 3 are the same option. It's called:
2. Standardize an encoding that most people aren't using and try to get
them to switch.
The only differences are that the UTF-8 encoding is used essentially
nowhere and implemented in few places right now, but is somewhat more
readable for people who don't implement it, whereas the RFC 2047 encoding
is *very* widely implemented but not widely used, and is fairly ugly for
people who don't implement it.
The belief of the people favoring the UTF-8 encoding is that it will
eventually become the native wire encoding of everything and therefore
will be easier to deal with. This belief seems ill-founded to me, to say
the least.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>