In <20030113093504(_dot_)67cda815(_dot_)moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
If you don't know whether it is structured or unstructured then you are,
officially, stuck.
but it only matters for the purpose of display. if you're using an
encoded-word
for anything other than purely human-readable text, you're not using them
properly.
Actually, it does matter for purposes other than display, because people
want to construct whitelists, blacklists, killfiles, etc so as to filter
or compartmentalise their mail and news, and they are certainly not going
to construct those lists using raw encoded-words.
so for instance use of encoded-words for newsgroup names is an improper use.
Yes, that we are agreed on.
so if an implementation doesn't recognize a field and treats it as
unstructured,
the worst that will happen is that it won't decode some encoded words before
display (because it won't recognize them next to some 'special' characters,
or it won't recognize that parentheses are comment delimeters).
Yes, but that is going beyond a strict reading of RFC 2047. And some
implementations may treat them as structured by default, or use other
heuristics. As I have said, the real problems are in generating RFC 2047.
You have to second guess what a plausible encoding of some unknown header
might be, and then you have to second guess what receiving agents might do
if you guessed wrongly.
and outside of to/cc/from/bcc/reply-to, few structured fields contain human
readable text anyway.
And that I think is the real point that I want to make. So long as
gateways manage to encode those cases correctly (and that is a MUST in my
proposed wording) then the few cases in other onscure headers that slip
through will hardly be a problem in practice.
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk Snail: 5
Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5