Here's an interesting path forward, although it's probably going to get
blasted for attempting to rewrite how e-mail works, that said:
* Define a new standard for Unicode based "messages". I'll call this
"rfcM". For the moment I'll suggest we think about a UTF-8 format
similar to what e-mail and Usenet look like today, headers, body,
UTF-8 everywhere. (Could also be UTF-16, UTF-32, or whatever, I'm
going to use UTF-8 just as a point of discussion.)
* Extend MIME (eg, define types) to allow for "message/rfcM". Boom,
e-mail is good. On 7 bit transports we can base64 encode the part,
on 8 bit clean transports they can be sent raw. At least for now
everyone will presumably use the base64 method.
- At this point e-mail transport RFC's should be updated for 8 bit
clean transport (assuming UTF-8), so at some point in the future
that can be the default choice.
* Define the new usenet format as an extension to "rfcM", adding the
special headers and other junk necessary to support news.
Now, mail<->news is easy. Moderators would need e-mail clients that
understand message/rfcM, but other than that there are no transport
issues. Over time, message/rfcM would become part of more and more
mail clients, eventually allowing message/rfc822 to be depreferenced,
leaving us with Unicode clean e-mail and news. Going the other way
is easy, e-mail that came in as message/rfcM can be turned directly
into news, things that came in as message/rfc822 would go through a
ISO-8859-1->UTF-8 translation and then be put into news.
Granted, I've left out a lot of details, but wouldn't this sort of
high level direction allow e-mail and usenet to reconverge in a
compatable format in the future, and make the interim time not too
painful for either group?
--
Leo Bicknell - bicknell(_at_)ufp(_dot_)org - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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