Dave Crocker writes:
paying attention to the installed base requires worrying about
compatibility with what has been established practise, not what
"might" work or what is "frequently" available.
RFC 2047 makes a blatantly incompatible change to the semantics of
various sequences of bytes. It defends this incompatibility by saying
The syntax of encoded-words is such that they are unlikely to
"accidentally" appear as normal text in message headers.
Why aren't you screaming about the difference between ``unlikely to''
and ``guaranteed to never''? This isn't a safe extension that merely
assigns semantics to previously prohibited behavior (such as ``8-bit
data is UTF-8''). This is an _incompatible change_ to the semantics of
perfectly _valid_ behavior. Why is that okay? What level of potential
collateral damage are you willing to tolerate?
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago