Finally -- to the guy at SUN: I too implemented ISO-2022 support
for Japanese in a mail program. I did it more than 5 years ago and
finished the project in To^kyo^. I too implemented it for Subjects,
and was told by the customer that I shouldn't have done so; they do
NOT use it in headers because of interoperability problems. I
correspond a fair amount with people in Japan, and to this day message
subjects of ISO-2022 kanji messages continue to be in US-ASCII using
either English or romanized Japanese.
I can no longer watch people say that Japanese don't want to, or in
fact don't use ISO-2022 kanji in their own mail. My experience from 2
years of working at Fujitsu's research labs in 1987 was that:
1) Everyone WANTED to be able to use real Japanese characters (i.e.
not just romanized Japanese in US-ASCII) in Subject: headers.
2) Internally they DID use Japanese in headers, but we were all
cautioned not to do so if the mail was going to go outside the lab.
No one in Japan will stop doing so just because you have a new RFC
that says you shouldn't, and in fact if you legitimatize ISO-2022 type
character sets in the body, I would expect people to want it even more
in the Subject: line, and the chances of it escaping to become even
greater.
It therefore must be deferred to a new RFC specifically to address this
issue. I suggest you Europeans start writing up draft RFC's NOW.
You appear to be suggesting that this is only a problem for the
Europeans and/or other non-Americans. Well I think that there is
demand for it here too, as I for one would like to be able to receive
mail with ISO-2022 Subject: data from those that I correspond with in
Japan, and not have to worry about it getting munged somewhere in
between.
I hate having to apologize for Americans' ignorance in Japan, and this
time that isn't even the reason. Let's not end up with one more
example of Americans thinking that our way is the best because it's
too hard or timne consuming to do it the *right* way.
Mark Feldman