ietf-822
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Re: RFC 2047 and gatewaying

2003-01-09 07:03:54

Charles

There are many more pieces of software than Usefor gateways which get
stuck because they do not know the correct way to parse some field. The
design flaw was in RFC 2047 which allowed that situation to be gotten 
into
in the first place.

This claim keeps being made with little supporting evidence. RFC 2047 
encoding has a number of features.

1. It employs an escape sequence "=?" which is only valid in certain 
   RFC [2]822 header contexts.
2. This is followed by an explicit character set and language tag which 
   allows a set of glyphs to be associated with code points.
   It is recommended that members of the ISO-8859-* series be used in
   preference to other character sets,but this often not the case with
   non-latin (i.e., Asian) languages.
3. This is followed by an encoding indicator ?Q? or ?B?
4. This is followed by the encoded text which is terminated by a "?=" 
sequence

In your opinion, which of these is/are problematic? 

I find the selection of an appropriate character set when generating 
headers somewhat problematic. This though could be addressed by moving to 
using UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-* as the preferred character set.

Nick

Nick Shelness
Independent Technology Consultant <nick(_at_)old-mill(_dot_)net>


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