Dave,
! ASCII defines particular character interpretations for particular bit
! patterns. For example, x0D0A is carriage-return, line-feed. While there
! is one view that ISO-2022-jp is "on top of" ASCII and therefore conformant
! to the RFC822 requirement for ASCII, there is another view which says that
! ASCII characters, like 'a', 'b', or 'c', are very definitely NOT the
! interpretations for the ISO-2022-jp characters and that therefore,
! ISO-2022-jp is NOT conformant.
So your interpretation of rfc822 seems to be something like this:
iso-2022-jp is not conformant to rfc822 because it's not strictly ASCII.
If it's right,
Q encoded iso-8859-1 is also not conformant because of the same reason.
Interpretation of rfc822 should not depend on the existence of charset label.
I think this kind of interpretation is not good for both
iso-2022-* and MIME charset labeling.
A little smoother and reasonable consensus of rfc822 is necessary
so that we can use iso-2022-* or B and Q encoding as a valid body of rfc822.
I understand that rfc822 is not enough for I14Y(interoperability I mean ;-)
and we need some other methods.
But if rfc822 allows only strict ASCII,
two candidates, charset labeling and iso-2022-* profiling, will violate rfc822.
Satoshi KINOSHITA