For another, we can always have a second
header that is in some other character encoding, thus allowing
non-English names, subject titles, etc.
I couldn't disagree more. There are vast numbers of educated people
that do not know English, ...
Did you actually bother to read what I wrote? I took special care to
mention that it is possible to have another set of headers, which
*could* be in some other language than English.
One of the ways of accomplishing this, is to have a header called:
Another-Header:
This would instruct the parser to assume the presence of another set
of headers (after the current one), which could be in some other
codeset than ASCII. This mechanism also allows more than two sets of
headers.
The reason for keeping the first set of headers in ASCII, is to be
compatible with the current Internet email standard, RFC-822.
Of course, we should mandate that the ASCII headers always contain
certain important pieces of information, so that this information can
be readily displayed or printed on any current device. Some vendors
may decide to show only a non-English header to a non-English speaking
user, which could duplicate the information in the ASCII headers. This
would use up some more space, so vendors may not feel like doing this
for small pieces of data. They may do it for magnetic tapes,
cartridges, floppy disks, exabytes, or CD-ROMs, however. Please
remember that my proposal (although not a new idea) is intended to be
able to be used with absolutely *any* series of bits.
As always, you need to compare the advantages and disadvantages.
Also, please remember that the user only needs to see the headers when
the computer can't figure out what to do with the bits (which happens
quite a lot these days, since the user needs to tell the computer what
the data is e.g. tar file, etc). That is, this data announcement
scheme is intended to allow blind interchange.
Cheers,
EvdP