ietf-822
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Re: New-ish idea on non-ascii headers

1991-09-28 06:33:34
Ned's proposal is almost identical to the Swedish proposal with some
additional coverage. I presume they are happy with it?

I am, but I have to discuss it with Peter and Olle on monday morning.
The total header-problem (RFC-header) is not really what we wanted,
that might delay the RFC-XXXX a long time if it is not seperated
from the RFC-XXXX. As Ned said, we must then talk with the news-people etc.

A simpler solution would be to accept the two headers that describes
the encoding of ONLY the Subject, Comment, and Content-Description fields.
That would easy be made with two new headers:
        Text-Header-Field-Type
        Text-Header-Field-Transfer-Encoding

Then the three headers (which the user might see as a part of
the mail, and not a header like From and To) could be interpretated
the same way as the body is described with the two headers
        Content-Type
        Content-Transfer-Encoding

In the discussion of the encodings, I remember that the quoting
characters was choosen, or at least tried to be choosen,
so that the encodings could be made on the header-text-fields also.

Is this not right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The extensions of this header problem to the other fields is not
possible to do in RFC-XXXX I think. It would take too long time.
We need the RFC-XXXX now, and the RFC-header must be so good
and accepted by all people on the net (the news-prople for example)
that it would delay the RFC-XXXX too long.

Bob Smart
                _     _
        Patrik Faltstrom

P.S. Yes, I use adiaeresis and odiaeresis in my name, and sometimes
     we in sweden write a line instead of the two dots above
     the characters. If I use the swedish ISO 646, my name 
     would be Patrik F{ltstr|m. Not that nice, is it? Still I think 
     that the addressing field, where the name will be, must still 
     be in US-ASCII. THIS is a problem to solve in the RFC-header. 
     That might not be solved until it is ok with other characters 
     than [a-zA-Z0-9., ] in the passwd-file on UNIX-systems and similar 
     system dependent files, i.e. even if you might be allowed to use 
     ISO-8859-1 in the From-field, I can not use it in the gecos-field 
     on my UNIX machine...