Well then maybe the IETF needs a reality check too.
there seems to be a lot of need for reality checks.
A gateway that will not transparently support 8 bit data in
headers will _not_ be able to transport the usenet traffic as it
is now.
and a gateway that sends 8bit traffic in email is sending traffic
that - no matter what character encoding it uses - will not be
correctly interpreted by the majority of email user agents in
use today. such traffic *might* be read correctly by the moderator
of a news group (if that person happens to use the same convention
used by the sender of that message), or it might not.
widespread current practice is to do things that work on a local
level, even if that practice diverges from one user to another,
or one group to another. but the purpose of standards is to encourage uniform
practice, because the interoperability of divergent practice doesn't scale.
in standards work, it's more important to specify something that can
be made to scalably interoperate than to specify something that is
compatible with existing practice.
--
Keith Moore http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/
27 February 1933 11 September 2001