I see that Ohta-san has started a campaign to get more people
to write to the list about the ISO 2022 issue.
Not only "more people" but "more implementors who are also users who
are supposed to need MIME charset", who were scarce in this ML before.
If IAB/IESG need similar input to recognize the necessity of I18N, I
can arrange so.
What I would suggest as replacement for the sentence he hates
would be the following:
The problem is that editors of the MIME draft have run away from the
technical discussion. If they haven't repented of their misbehavior
yet and won't accept the modification, we need new ones.
In the absence of a MIME-Version: field, the recipient may
choose to believe anything about the content of the message,
but the sender cannot assume that anything outside the
US-ASCII character set will be understood by MIME capable readers.
This would seem to be less inconsistent with current practice than
the current text.
Urrrr... It still binding something outside of MIME.
The non-US non-MIME senders DO assume that something outside the
US-ASCII character set will be understood by MIME capable readers of the
recipient.
That's how non-US implementors have implemented MIME.
So, why not just say:
In the absence of a MIME-Version: field, the encoding used is
outside the scope of this document.
(Note that I have *not* said anything about the occurrence of ESC in
the headers, and neither does the RFC 1521 revision. That is a whole
different kettle of fish!)
Our whole point is that don't illegislate the currently working code
developed over rough consensuses on the interpretation of RFC 822.
Masataka Ohta