Bart Schaefer writes:
the people who wanted non-ASCII character sets in headers did not have
the clout to force most of the established players to go along.
False. Popular demand forced the last 7-bit MTA implementors to support
ISO 8859-1 throughout messages, including header fields. Try deploying a
new 7-bit MTA and you'll find yourself laughed out of the marketplace.
Welcome to the real world.
assorted transports (and maybe even some MUAs) could not be counted upon
to pass through a header field with an unknown name, or to pass it undamaged
Are you claiming that all new fields were bad? Nothing in your argument
has any connection to the semantics of the unknown header field. Unless
you're willing to say
A new Content-Type field was a bad idea: maybe some clueless MTA
destroyed all fields it didn't recognize. We should have used tags
inside message bodies.
then you can't say the same thing about a new Header-Character-Encoding
field versus tags in the message header.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago