Bruce Lilly writes:
But that is only for display -- hardly a critical issue.
Display is a critical issue. The reason that we aren't satisfied with
ASCII is that it doesn't let us display most of the glyphs that people
want to see.
Maybe you've never used anything beyond ASCII. Maybe you think of all
these character-set extensions as abstract games having nothing to do
with text displayed on the screen. Millions of users disagree with you.
user-defined fields are required to begin with "X-"
False. See RFC 822. Anyway, this is irrelevant to the discussion. As
you've now admitted, the locations of RFC 2047 encoded words are not
stable: they are affected by RFCs specifying new header fields.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago