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

[Chris Newman <Chris.Newman at innosoft.com>]

On Tue, 14 Jul 1998, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:
> 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.

I'm a huge fan of UTF-8 myself, but this is the wrong place to address the
issue.  8-bit characters in headers are illegal and as this is going
experimental, there's no way it can or should override a rule in a
full-standard spec which has good reason behind it.

The right choice for the charset in Originator-Info is the same charset
used in other headers and body parts, whatever that may be.  Hopefully
this will become UTF-8 in the future, but it certainly isn't today.

If you want to allow unencoded UTF-8 in message headers, you'll have a
long and bloody fight ahead of you.  It may not be possible to deploy
unencoded UTF-8 in headers without either breaking standards compliant
software or deploying a UTF8HEADER extension to SMTP, IMAP and POP.
Originator-Info is the wrong place to do either of these.

		- Chris