Given that people have been sending 8-bit data in headers for
years without regard to any existing standard, why do you
believe that releasing a standard that mandates UTF-8 will
cause them to start paying attention to standards again?
It doesn't take much common sense to see those people putting 8-bit data in
headers are precisely the ones who think a) 8-bits in headers work (for
their purposes) and thus b) would be most likely to adopt an 8-bit standard.
Most importantly they would likely be the *least* likely to accept going
back to 7 bits and encoding if they already have experience that 8-bits
work.
I must say that I don't find the argument "because I
personally like this new standard better than the one that we
have now" particularly persuasive when it comes to predicting
the behavior of anyone other than you personally.
Given the history of how many standards have evolved in the past, I can't
much reason to agree with you. Protocols are *full* of examples of this
sort of evolution, whereby technically illegal (but largely working)
practices evolved into an accepted form. Even Usenet. For example, the
now-obsolete 14-character newsgroup component limit. Or the leading-digit
prohibition in early DNS. People did illegal but common sense things, and
eventually the standards caught up to them. Once they did, they adopted the
new more sensible stanards.
--Dave