Bob Smart wrote:
P.S. On Greg's point that "no one has objected to the Real headers". I
would point out that I said "Nor do I think the Real headers will
be regarded as satisfactory [by the Europeans et al.]". This was intended
to be a strong objection. However it is rather spooky conducting this
debate without a single European voice. Keld where are you...
I was in Budapest, Hungary :-)
Well, I have seen more suggestions, and then even some with some
formal weight:
1. NETF (Nordunet) decided in march to do something with the headers
along the quoting and encoding that was described recently here.
That is the atoms must be enclosed in quotes, and any metacharacters
should be quoted. This would work both for the (then current ) DIS 10646
and for mnemonic (which uses some of the metacharacters in its namings).
This scheme would also work for the new 10646 AUC.
The counter argument here is that some MTAs would not handle this
properly, although this is clearly in the specifications of 822.
I would say that MTAs having problems because they do not comply
to RFC 822, well they are broken and should be fixed.
The recommendation of NETF was to have a header header-charset
(allowing 8-bit (32-bit) entries in certain headers)
and to use quoted-printable for the 7-bit downgrading.
2. IETF in Copenhagen in June decided to use quoted-printable
in the headers. No 8-bit characters were allowed in headers.
Still a header-charset header was required, to interpret the
quoted-printable encoding.
My personal opinion: well I tend to support decisions that I have
participated in, although I do not fully agree to them.
The new "Real-*" headers I am not sure about, but it looks like
they will work. John and others do not want to have such information
in more than one header, they may be right.
If we use "real-*" headers I would prefer using mnemonic as the
7-bit encoding as it is more understandable to the user using
plain old interfaces (would you expect me to say otherwise?:-)
There will be a NETF meeting next week where we will talk about it.
Unfortunately it seems like I will not be able to attend the full
meeting there - although it is in Copenhagen.
Keld