In <ylk7hnwi2d(_dot_)fsf(_at_)windlord(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu> Russ Allbery
<rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu> writes:
I never understood what was wrong with RFC 2047 encoding, at least for
everything except the Newsgroups header (which poses some special
challenges), but many other people on USEFOR seem to feel that it would be
a catastrophically bad decision, and as I only speak English, I don't feel
particularly well-qualified to comment.
I think it is a general belief that cramming 8 bits into 7 was never going
to be the solution for the long term. Does anyone really believe that we
shall still be using $RFC 2047 encoding in 20 years time? There is just
too much effort being expended in writing code to encode and decode
things. That may be acceptable for mainstream servers and user agents, but
it is an utter pain for people who write scripts and filters for special
purpose uses. Yes, there are some nice facilities in the Perl CPAN
library, but it is still hard work to use them.
The fact is that people will use whatever works for them. There is already
a considerable amount of Non-ASCII around in both Usenet and Email. Email
transports are now mostly 8bit clean, and even Sendmail are committeed to
that in their next major release, if not before. The IETF can indeed try
to enforce standards such as RFC 2047, but the IETF also needs to remember
the fate of King Canute.
The majority of folks on USEFOR also seem to me to have bought
wholeheartedly into the concept of Unicode and the belief that Unicode
will displace all other character sets in the near future, that all
software will soon expect any untagged 8-bit data to be in Unicode, and
that handling Unicode is all that's necessary to move forward into the
non-ASCII world.
Well it seems that Microsoft have bought into Unicode pretty thoroughly,
and that may well be the determining factor. Much as it grieves me to
admit it, this may be one thing that Microsoft did right.
OTOH, one hears rumours that the Chinese are not altogether happy.
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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