... The devil's advocate will understand that the full machinery of IETF
is now available to finish RFC-XXXX ... but that, if those europeans
want to have meaningful headers (something that is part of the original problem
RFC-XXXX was to solve), they will be on their own, except perhaps
that the rest of the world will be there to watch and flame...
Fortunately, the devil's advocate is exaggerating the situation. I think
most people here do feel that the problem of non-ASCII in headers needs
solving, and are willing to help rather than just watch and flame. However,
it is becoming fairly clear that:
a) This is a non-trivial problem with no tidy solution.
b) It is going to take quite some time to hammer out a workable
approach that most everyone can agree on. (Saying "but
it could happen tomorrow if everyone would just see things
my way" is not helpful.)
c) The current contents of XXXX, by contrast, are a workable and
mostly agreed-on solution to the non-ASCII-in-body problem.
d) The header and body problems are not so interdependent that
they must be solved together.
e) While both problems are important, the body problem definitely
has priority. Being forced to put the Subject in ASCII is
annoying, to be sure, but it's not at the same level as
being limited to ASCII everywhere in the body.
The obvious response to the situation is to get XXXX out the door before
we settle in to the battle over the header problem. Agreed that it would
be best to solve both at once. "The best is the enemy of the good."
Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
henry(_at_)zoo(_dot_)toronto(_dot_)edu utzoo!henry