ietf-mta-filters
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Re: List of expected changes for sieve 05 draft

1998-11-10 02:19:43
At 15:52 09.11.98 -0800, Chris Newman wrote:

7.  Request: Implementations are required to decode header charsets.

I could live with this.  A lighter-weight alternative would be:
Implementations are required to (a) treat all non-ASCII characters in a
script as a syntax error or (b) decode MIME header encoding.  That's the
"you don't have to do it, but if you do it, do it right" approach.


Decoding to what?

3 possibilities:

- Decode to octet string (simple, but dangerous)
- Decode to UTF-8 (requires universal charset translation)
- Decode if you recognize the charset, otherwise leave alone, which
  leaves a *slight* incompatibility problem with server upgrades.
 
I'm fine with the decoding being to an octet string, and the expected
charset being implicit in the comparator function, but one needs
to *somehow* get access to the charset name(s?) to be able to detect the
case where "shit happens".
Something like this:

  if subject contains "I ordered a Räksmörgås" then
      if matched charset is iso-8859-1 then
          do something
      else
          don't dare to do something
      fi
  fi

Syntax wildly inventive...haven't read -04, I'm afraid....

Note that Räksmörgås will be represented in UTF-8 in the script while
the script is being moved around. UTF-8 can't represent the octets
of 8859-1 without an escaping mechanism, and a layman user would go
bonkers if asked to use one.

And simply declaring matching on anything that isn't English illegal
forever is Not An Option.

We have a problem.

(Räksmörgås is Swedish for a shrimp open-faced sandwich; popular for
testing because it contains the 3 most important special Swedish letters...)

                     Harald

      

-- 
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Maxware, Norway
Harald(_dot_)Alvestrand(_at_)maxware(_dot_)no