Re: Last Call: Originator-Info Message Header to Experimental

["Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <Shmuel at ACM.ORG>]

I am in favor of the proposed Originator_Info header, but the Devil is
in the details. Specifically, I question the wisdom of prohibiting use
of the attributes in filters, and I strongly disagree with the
specification of  character set.

While it is true that the header can be trivially forged, that does
not  not provide adequate grounds for a MUST NOT. If I choose to use
the  contents of this header for purposes of authorization, no harm to
the net occurs, although I may cause harm to myself. Even a SHOULD NOT
is questionable.

Given the current direction of internationalization, I don't see why
any choice of character encoding other than UTF-8 makes sense. Use of
MIME means that attributes will be unreadable by those not possessing
the appropriate character sets, even if they have all of the glyphs.
The only advantage that I can see for MIME is in distinguishing the
oriental languages that have been "unified" in Unicode.


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 -- End of forwarded message
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     Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
     Atid/2
     Team OS/2
     Team PL/I
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