Bruce Lilly writes:
header field order can (and does) change, so there's no way of
guaranteeing that a header-encoding header-field would always precede
use of any specified encoding
So what? Does your MUA also have trouble displaying From before Subject
when the From line in the message comes after the Subject line?
precludes use of different encodings for different header fields
Use a universal character set and a universal encoding. This is not
rocket science.
how would you magically change the large installed base of software
(not to mention networks) overnight?
Nobody is talking about an overnight change. Deployment of 8-bit body
support in sendmail took some time after Allman implemented it in 1993,
for example.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago