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

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

On Thu, 16 Jul 1998, Martin J. Duerst wrote:
> I would be nice if some of the old 7-bit die-hards would recognize that
> having UTF-8 directly (i.e. without MIME encoding) in headers is what
> we should end up sooner or later anyway (of course with proper
> standardization),
> so that long and bloody fights can be avoided. Making sure that raw
> headers are consistently UTF-8 is a good way to avoid having them 
> (raw!) in whatever other encodings.

I would like to see raw UTF-8 in headers at some point in the future.

However, when the IETF declares something a standard, it means it.  So we
can't deploy a new proposed standard which breaks standards-compliant
software.  And it turns out that raw 8-bit in headers breaks (or causes
incorrect/undesirable results) from a lot of standards-compliant software.
That means we have to design and standardize a suitable transition plan
(akin to the successful 8BITMIME SMTP extension) before unencoded 8-bit is
permitted in headers under any circumstances. 

I'll observe that prior to RFC 2277 and the ISO-10646/Unicode language
tagging proposal, it wasn't feasible to consider such a transition plan.

		- Chris