Do you consider sorting a "display purpose"? How about searching
given some user input?
seems fine to me.
Well, in that case I think you're being a bit naive when you say
earlier, "Decoding is only supposed to happen prior to display or
printing, not prior to storage."
point taken.
Requiring a search to do 2047 (and
therefore likely 822) parsing on each and every searched message in a
large message store is much too processor intensive in some
environments.
it's hardly unusual for search engines to construct indices to speed
searching. I don't see any problem with the search indices being built
with decoded header fields, but it's cleaner if the actual messages
are not altered.
In
either case, allowing the user to edit the subject of a reply
probably means de-coding and re-encoding the 2047, which runs into
exactly the kind of problem that Arnt was getting at in his original
message.
yes, but once the subject is edited, it's not the same subject any
longer, and you don't expect it to match up with previous subjects in
the thread.
It would be nice to think that "decode only for display purposes"
would be a complete answer. It's not.
no, but it's close. the point is that if you try to decode these things
too early then you break things.
Keith