Quoteing moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu, on Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 11:22:05PM
-0500:
e) At some point tools that generate the 7 bit format are all but gone.
Use of it can be forbidden, and support for it no longer required.
it takes a very long time before support is no longer required - people
still want to be able to read old email or news messages.
Won't UAs that support raw utf-8 in headers but don't support decoding
2047 tagging in header fields work exactly as "well" as the UAs that
existed when RFC 2047 was first implemented?
But I would agree, newsreaders are probably the only large class of
UA that never had to understand MIME charset encoding, so won't have
to implement it to understand old news articles, they could just extend
to understanding utf-8, if USEFOR is allowed their way.
Cheers,
Sam