Keith Moore writes:
But if users rely on nonstandard features, they deserve whatever they get.
Your standards don't provide the features that the users want. You lose.
The current reality is that many users rely on unencoded ISO-8859-1. If
you ignore them, they will ignore you---and they're the ones in charge.
MUAs with poor 8-bit support and without any European users can get away
with broad rules such as
Interpret all 8-bit characters in the header as UTF-8.
But other implementors will be much happier with
Interpret all 8-bit characters in the header as UTF-8 _if_ you see
the following special header field: ...
This avoids creating any new problems for current users.
Wrong.
I can't imagine what you could possibly be disagreeing with. The special
header field doesn't show up in any current messages.
---Dan