Bruce Lilly writes:
could you please explain the circumstances under which some individual
would need to edit an encoded-word which is part of another person's
display name in a header field
I press ``f'' in my mailer. It creates a tentative followup to the
message I'm looking at, and invokes my text editor. I then edit the
message to taste.
Sometimes I edit header fields. For example, I might change the Subject
line. What do you think happens if I correct the spelling of an RFC 2047
French word with an accent? That's right: I'm editing an encoded word.
Of course, display is critical. I need to read what I'm editing. I can't
read RFC 2047 gobbledygook. My text editor is not going to support RFC
2047 and IDNA GoofyCode and all the other complicated ad-hoc ``7 bits
forever!'' character encodings. The crucial advantage of UTF-8 is its
generality: it can and will be used everywhere.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago