In <3E2019AA(_dot_)30805(_at_)Sonietta(_dot_)blilly(_dot_)com> Bruce Lilly
<blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> writes:
Charles Lindsey wrote:
But for some purposes (followups) the header gets used as the basis of
headers in a new message, and at that point the starting point has to be
the decoded form (since how else is the user to edit the new message).
I don't follow your argument; could you please explain the circumstances
under which some individual would need to edit an encoded-word which is
part of another person's display name in a header field. There is no
need to decode and re-encode in order to use a From field content to generate
a new To, Cc, etc. field.
The situation is going to arise most commonly within Subject-headers,
which the user will most certainly expect to be able to edit.
It will need to be copied into To or Cc fields if the user wants to email
his followup as well as to post it. I expect most user agents will expect
the user to edit his To or Cc fields too. A clever agent might well spot
that the field was unchanged since it was taken from an earlier
From/Reply-To, and thus preserve the original 2047 encoding. But I rather
doubt that agents are going to be that clever in practice. So they will
re-encode it.
That is
clearly the intent of RFC 2047. The design flaw, as has been already
mentioned, is decoding encoded-words for transmission.
But nobody is proposing to do that.
The Usefor draft permits it by allowing raw untagged 8-bit data to be
transmitted between generating user agents and gateways.
If some raw untagged 8-bit data is produced then, by definition, it is not
in the form of an encoded-word, so the question of "decoding it for
transmission" cannot possibly arise. If, at some gateway, it gets encoded,
then it is now in RFC 2047 form (hopefully correct), and then it will
remain so, so the question of "decoding it for transmission" still cannot
arise. Hence your claim, as quoted above, is plain wrong.
As I said.
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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