ietf-822
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Re: Let us finish RFC-XXXX NOW! (Re: non-ascii headers)

1991-09-27 16:45:26
The users will naturally want to continue to use our special
characters, as they allways have. But suddently -- as those characters
now will be 8-bit -- we have to stop them from doing that on the
subject line. This is a severe decrease in functionality.

RFC-XXXX changes nothing in this regard. It simply restates what is presently
stated in RFC822, and explicitly specifies the character set that was not
completely specified in RFC822.

I think I have to clear out a couple of things, perhaps to smooth the
very hard discussion just now. When Peter talks about "using our
special characters", he means that before RFC-XXXX, all mailers and
computers in Sweden used for example left-brace for adiaeresis.
The left brace was displayed as a adiaeresis, ans also the keyboard
was made, so the user actually thought he was using the adiaeresis
and not (as he was doing) the left brace.

Now almost all computers turns into 8-bit (at least). Sun among others
support ISO-8859-1 since a year or so. Our users continues to use
what they think is adiaeresis, which on a Sun now suddenly, has become
a prohibited character in the Subject line.

There is no deteriotion. You are living in a fantasy world if you think
your present violations of RFC822 and RFC821 are not causing operability
problems. Sorry, it does cause them. We're trying to come up with a
scheme that does not.

We do not violate the RFC822! We have on the NORDUnet in several years
been running a conversion of 8-bit into 7-bit on ALL of our mailers.
We also have used a "ISOC-8859-1" extension to the RFC822 (here we
actually have a violation...) to check if the reciever can accept
ISO-8859-1 text. The problem is how to use the different characters.

I note in passing that your voice was not raised in the debate ab>out how to
accomplish all of this using mnemonic or whatever. (At least I don't recall any
input from you -- correct me if I'm wrong.) We could have used your input
then...

I must correct you now. One of the first proposals was made by
a group inside the NORDUNET-ETF, and that started all this debate.
We made the TEXT-HEX encoding, we have discussed with Keld his
mnemonic encoding and hopefully helped him with some good input,
we also have made from the NORDUnet a proposal to the RFC-822 that 
has been to discussion in the IETF meetings by our representative, 
Jan Michael Rynning, so I'm sure think we have worked over here in 
the Nordic countries too. But still, we are only 8 millions of us
is sweden, much less than the number of people in NewYork, so
you might not have heard our voice.

The ONLY argument against your great work to make the RFC-XXXX is the
use of non-ASCII in headers.

Our "positive" proposal (now repeated for the third time) is to
have seperate header to describe the character sets used in the Subject
as you saw in the first message from Peter that started this unnessesary
flaming.

We do understand you and your arguments I think, but still: Why stop now!
We do not want to use our local usage of ASCII.

Perhaps it will be like Keld is writing, we still have to use
our old 7-bit swedish or danish or norwegan version of ASCII. I do not
hope so.

        Patrik