Charles Lindsey wrote:
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.
The fact is that the decision to use untagged, unencoded utf-8 in
newsgroup component tags has implications for software complexity in
servers and clients and intermediate software (e.g. IMAP implementations)
as well as gateways.
It is already the case that 2.5% [1] of Usenet articles use raw Non-ASCII
characters in their headers. I have not heard of any damage or chaos
arising from gateways that cannot cope.
[...]
And that problem is not limited to Netnews. 30% of the Email that I
receive has raw Non-ASCII in its headers.
There is a very important difference between
A. Some user entered some illegal information and some software implementation
incorrectly transmitted it verbatim in violation of standards
and
B. A draft ecourages violation of standards.
In the former case, the user and/or software author are at fault. In the
latter case, the draft has no hope of being approved by the IETF.