Hello, all
I just came back from a meeting about RFC-XXXX, IN EUROPE, BY EUROPEANS.
(Well, Scandinavians; they are at least on one edge of Europe....)
The NETF is the Nordunet Engineering Task Force, a gathering of technical
people from the academic networks of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Dennmark and
Iceland (and a few non-academics) that work at coordinating solutions to
the problems felt by network users in the Nordic countries.
There were two messages that came through loud and clear:
1) WE WANT RFC-XXXX, SOON.
2) WE WANT NON-ASCII TEXT IN HEADERS
These two goals are naturally somewhat in conflict now.
Suggestions that were raised at the meeting included:
- block RFC-XXXX processing until headers are in :-( 1)
- push RFC-XXXX out the door, add a later "headers" RFC :-( 2)
- use the "standardization process" of the IAB to ensure that the two
eventually become linked in an "either-both-or-none" clause
Reason for the :-( 1): it delays all of us, and opens up the room for even
more filibusterers to creep in.
Reason for the :-( 2): it allows people to implement RFC-XXXX, do nothing
about headers, and say "we support national characters; we do not need to
support them in headers"
A third conclusion, which might be of interest to you:
In a 7-bit environment, we generally thought that the "mnemonic" encoding
of non-ASCII characters suggested by Keld Simonsen was more user-friendly
than the alternatives, and would therefore recommend that this be used in
all text mail.
See you all (or at least some of you) in Santa Fe!
Harald Tveit Alvestrand
Chairman, NETF Message Handling group
UNINETT postmaster