ietf-822
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Re: RFC 2047 and gatewaying

2003-01-09 13:48:54

In a message written on Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 08:15:38PM -0000, D. J. Bernstein 
wrote:
To summarize your transition plan:

   (1) Teach every message reader how to parse message/utf8, just like
       message/rfc822 but allowing UTF-8.

No, teach every message reader for the subset of people who need to read
news in e-mail.

   (2) Allow message writers to generate UTF-8 using message/utf8.

This is only a requirement for message writers who need non-US-ASCII
characters, as the e-mail->news gateway can easily do a US-ASCII-UTF-8
conversion.

Here's a better transition plan:

   (1) Teach every message reader to accept UTF-8 in message/rfc822.
       Some readers do this already.
   (2) Allow message writers to generate UTF-8 in message/rfc822.

No, that's a bad plan.  I will submit there are at least an order of
magnitude, and perhaps two or three more e-mail clients in the world
than 1) people who read news at all, or 2) people who read news
gatewayed to e-mail.

Any proposal dependant on all things that parse rfc822 today being able
to parse UTF-8 to make this work will fail.  If they don't fail in the
standards bodies, they will fail in the real world.  There's no way
Usenet/Usefor has enough leverage to change the e-mail world.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell(_at_)ufp(_dot_)org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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