Well, basically it is the same, but with some improvements and
enhancements. MIME should be enhanced in the same way, to remedy
the inconveniciences found in 2 years of MIME practice.
Sure. Just make the default charset not US-ASCII but ISO-2022-INT-*
(described in draft-ohta-text-encoding-01.txt) and add more elegant
header encoding and everything will be fine. Just a minor update
and we don't need 8 bit supoort.
Uhhh...maybe not. The requirements for encoding text in headers are
more stringent than for the message body. In particular, you have
to make sure that any characters that are "special" to RFC 822, do
not appear in the ISO-2022-INT-* encoded form of text. If they do,
you still need "Q" encoding at least.
But this is really beside the point.
Everyone agrees (including the author!) that 1522 is ugly. But at this point,
UNLESS THERE ARE UNFIXABLE TECHNICAL FLAWS in 1522, any attempt at solving this
problem in a way which is incompatible with 1522, is a non-starter.
Given the amount of traffic that is gatewayed between mail and news,
I suspect this is true for news as well as for e-mail.
Keith Moore