What I was thinking of when complaining about 14 headers is that people
will want to use extended-charset in the headers *they* think are important.
These might be Mail-defined, News-defined, undefined (X-fruit-of-the-day)
or wrong.
A solution (like mine...plug, plug!) that lists the headers that the
encoding should apply to avoids the problem neatly, I think.
Your proposal has the beautiful idea of defining a little program
for a given header to tell you where the specified character set
applies. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered:
Header-encoding: ISO_8859-1, Quoted-Printable, To:-<,; From:(-)
Header-encoding: RFC-MNEM, 7bit, Subject
To: \:AEgrim \:8Fberg <Ogrim(_dot_)Aberg(_at_)sics(_dot_)se>, \:97len Flatmark
<alen(_at_)sics(_dot_)se>
From: <haavard(_at_)idt(_dot_)unit(_dot_)no> (H\:8Fvard)
Subject: Writing &AE in a header line
Would the ISO-8859-1 in the To line run out at an "<" inside a quoted
phrase? Etc. I'd like to hear from an implementor before I was
convinced it was manageable.
Also we don't have any idea whether the syntax of X-fruit-of-the-day
will be simple enough to be handled by your scheme. Far better for
the people using the X-fruit-of-the-day header to define in their
own standardization processes exactly which bits of the field body of
the header are affected by the Header-charset (if any).
Also your scheme does not handle the problem of combining phrases
from various places into a single To line, which I (and Nathaniel
Borenstein) regard as crucial.
By the way the phrase in the "To:" line in your example needs to be quoted
because of the ":"s.
Bob Smart