Brett Kottmann <bkottmann(_at_)webteamone(_dot_)com> writes:
Is there any (serious) disadvantage to relying on the format of email
messages as the template for news messages?
That pretty much cuts to the heart of the matter, doesn't it?
The people who strongly dislike RFC 2047 and want to use UTF-8 in headers
without additional encoding would say yes, and that RFC 2047 is
unnecessarily complex. The people who figure that one has to deal with
RFC 2047 anyway and that it's not likely to go away any time soon would
say no, nothing is really gained.
You're seeing extended posts from both sides of that question.
I've seen the discussions go on for some time...is it just me or does
anyone else think that stating "the format of a news message and header
shall conform to the current standard for email message bodies and
headers" would save a great deal of time?
Yes, it does. It saves a vast amount of time, which is why almost exactly
that phrasing was used in RFC 1036, the previous standard for news
messages.
The attempted removal of that phrase from the current USEFOR draft has, by
itself, probably resulted in something on the order of two years of
argument and debate.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>