Re: [EAI] Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-eai-imap-utf8-07

[Alexey Melnikov <alexey.melnikov at isode.com>]

Black_David at emc.com wrote:

> Alexey,
>  
Hi David,

> > > - The recommendation to support MIME header upconversion for
> > > 	"Other widely deployed MIME charsets" strikes me as
> > > 	too vague to be useful guidance to implementers.   
> ...
>  
>
> > I believe John Klensin has adequately responded to this point.
> >    
> John has thoroughly demolished the change I suggested, but I
> don't think that demolition resolves this concern, as the original
> text remains vague.
>
> OTOH, this draft is intended to be an Experimental RFC - would
> it be reasonable to say that determining which charsets should
> be upconverted is part of the experiment?
I am quite skeptical that we can come to a consensus after running such 
experiment. The answer to the question is going to be very 
region/country specific.
This is not the first time we are discussing the rathole (the same 
applies to MIME, IMAP SEARCH, IMAP CONVERT extension) and this looks 
like a big rathole to me.

I think you mentioned earlier that maybe an implementation should 
support conversion to UTF-8 of all charsets it already supports in 
SEARCH. After thinking more about this I think this proposal is quite 
sensible.

Alternatively, the sentence saying:

 Other widely deployed MIME charsets SHOULD be supported

should just be removed, as I tend to agree that it doesn't provide much 
useful information.