ietf-822
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RE: RFC 2047 and gatewaying

2003-01-03 23:03:44

Charles, as someone with absolutely no political or religious stakes in
this discussion, I'd like to point out to you that I've found Ned Freed
to be one of the most level-headed, open-minded IETF oldtimers.  I've
seen him go out of his way to offer constructive criticism, and be far
more open to new ideas than many.  You've already spent several years of
your life working on usefor; I would suggest that you ignore his counsel
now at your work's peril.  The fact that he is the IESG member with the
most email/news/MIME/gateway experience only reinforces the weight his
opinion (positive or negative) would anyway hold.

Most specifically, I would immediately drop the idea of a message/rfc822
with anything other than 7 bit headers, as the idea is clearly dead on
arrival.  But, I think you need to suggest to usefor that they
reconsider the entire current approach.  Charles, you said:

1. Netnews is to be regarded fundamentally as an 8-bit clean medium.
It is a _different_ medium than Email, although there are strong
links that must be preserved.

This is not a novel concept.  HTTP and BEEP are application-level
protocols that are 8-bit-clean, use MIME, and yet have been able to
survive just fine with 7-bit headers.

Charles said:

5. Insofar as these choices conflict with practice in the Email
world, there was a consciously taken decision to compress any
resultant messiness into the gateways. The number of these is small
compared to the vast number of Unsnet servers worldwide and the even
vaster number of clients. 

Ned said:

Yawn. Heard all these arugments before back with MIME. This doesn't
address the backwards compatibility issue, and like it or not this is
an issue you are going to have to address.

This is perhaps Ned's most important statement.  At countless times in
the last 20 years, the IETF and it's predecessors have chosen backward
compatibility over the "efficient" solution.  The (IESG-approved) IDNA
drafts epitomize this approach, by promulgating an "ugly-looking"
transfer encoding (punycode) rather than the "elegant" solution of
UTF-8.  The economic calculation was that clients that care about i18n
can implement IDNA, but that the IETF would not break the "social
contract" made with DNS software that was (and now still will be)
compatible with pre-IDNA standards.

Similarly, a usefor solution that does not immediately cause existing
software (*including* gateways) to "break" on usefor messages, seems
1000 times more likely to pass IESG muster.  To quote Ned again:

The issue is instead that your approach in effect declares a large
body of software as being no longer compliant with long established
standards. This is something we try very hard not to do.

You say:

This is
why the WG sought, and was given in its charter, permission to
include extensions to the existing protocols.

But, usefor's charter says:

"The Goal of this working group is to publish a standards-track
successor to RFC 1036 that with particular attention to backward
compatibility, formalizes best current practice and best proposed
practice."

I believe you're radically underestimating the IESG interest in that
backward compatibility, specifically in how it relates to mail gateways.
Further, I don't think anyone on the IESG will consider "UTF-8 in
headers") as an essential feature of "best proposed practice".  The IESG
will demand i18n of headers, but it will equally push for the lowest
impact way of achieving this.

Kai Henningsen said:

Very shortly put, there is a long tradition on Usenet of passionately
hating 2047 encoding in at least some quarters. Note the word
"passionately"; it is not exaggerated. Long flamewars have been fought
about this before anyone even thought about USEFOR.

My only personal stance on this is that I consider it a serious,
inexcusable bug that 2821/2822 do not allow naked UTF-8 in headers.
Frankly, "we once made the mistake to spec 7 bits so this must remain
7 bit forever" is absolutely and inexcusably insane. But that is a
mail problem, not a news problem.

Not only is it a news problem, but it is the news problem that will
likely prevent the usefor draft from being approved.  What I don't get
is that news clients will need to understand 2047 and 2231 syntax
anyway, since such things are bound to leak in (from email if nowhere
else).

Kai's argument is quite similar to the arguments made in IDN for "just
use UTF-8".  A strong consensus was reached that the elegance of UTF-8
was a far lower priority than backward compatibility.  For RFC 2822, the
value of backward compatibility over elegance was even more obvious.  If
you care about wasting bits in RFC 2047 encoding of UTF-8, start
worrying about the ATM cell tax of every DSL line, or the obnoxious
SONET overhead.  But if you want to deploy a standard in the IETF, focus
on backward compatibility.

I have a simple question.  What can a UTF-8 subject header communicate
that an RFC 2047 one can't?  Other than inelegance, what's the downside
of 2047, when the upside is a huge increase in backward compatibility?
Given that any reasonable news agent is going to need to be able to do
"pretty display" of the following address from
<http://www.normos.org/ietf/draft/draft-faerber-i18n-email-netnews-names
-00.txt>:

  From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Claus_F=E4rber?=
<zq--cfrber-cua(_at_)zq--frber-gra(_dot_)muc(_dot_)de>

and that RFC 1958 says that "If there are several ways of doing the same
thing, choose one",

why require an additional encoding of UTF-8 at all?

In summary, I would strongly consider redefining the usefor article
format to be RFC 2822+2047+2231 + a bunch of 1036 headers +
faerber-i18n.  Unless and until you can make a compelling case for UTF-8
*and* you can explain how a large number of gateways will not break on
usefor messages, I would give up on UTF-8 headers.

          - dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com>
<http://www.dankohn.com/>  <tel:+1-650-327-2600>

  Randomly generated quote:
As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has
proceeded from the womb and long gestation of progressive history, so
the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful
work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man. 
- W.E. Gladstone    

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