Harald Tveit Alvestrand writes:
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....)
That parenthetical remark is important! I believe that the use of
perversions of ASCII (:-) to accomodate national characters hasn't
spread in parts of Europe outside Scandinavia (if that includes
Iceland). I have never received e-mail from Germany, France, Italy,
Spain or Portugal with names containing {|} -- they all drop the
accents or use alternatives developed for telex (ue for u-umlaut
etc.). The same holds here in the Netherlands.
It's not that I believe non-ASCII headers are not important -- it's
just that repeatedly the opinions and problems of SCANDINAVIA are
brought up as opinions and problems of EUROPE as a whole...
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido(_at_)cwi(_dot_)nl>
"What a senseless waste of human life"
The problem seems to have skipped the Atlantic. Canada regularly produces
mail that is 822 invalid because it contains french accented characters (and I
may have seen one or two of these from France, also). They way this problem
was solved was to change the translate tables to make the characters valid and
pass them on to the next poor soul.
These problems are not localized to the scandinavian coutries, but at the
moment we seem to have contained the problem to the planet Earth. But if
RFC-XXXX goes out the door without a header solution close behind it I am sure
you will see an increase in the kind of behaviour I've mentioned above. I
think you have to accept that although there is no technical linkage between
body and header the average user thinks there is. They believe that any
character they can validly type in the body of a message should also be valid
in the headers (if we could just get rid of the users this problem would be
much easier).
John Wagner