On Sep 10, 2018, at 11:23 AM, Neil Hunsperger
<Neil_Hunsperger=40symantec(_dot_)com(_at_)dmarc(_dot_)ietf(_dot_)org> wrote:
I'll add a data point. Some years back, the PGP Desktop product added an
unsigned "Charset" header to its ASCII armor. The result looked like this:
And for what it’s worth, section 6.2 of RFC 4880 says:
- "Charset", a description of the character set that the plaintext
is in. Please note that OpenPGP defines text to be in UTF-8. An
implementation will get best results by translating into and out
of UTF-8. However, there are many instances where this is easier
said than done. Also, there are communities of users who have no
need for UTF-8 because they are all happy with a character set
like ISO Latin-5 or a Japanese character set. In such instances,
an implementation MAY override the UTF-8 default by using this
header key. An implementation MAY implement this key and any
translations it cares to; an implementation MAY ignore it and
assume all text is UTF-8.
All those MAYs are there because of the real world considerations. People still
use JIS all over the place, for example, and this allows them to mark their
text and have it work correctly. (That’s why we put it in both the standard and
software. The examples of Latin-5 and JIS were real.) On the other hand, there
was a completely reasonable objection that there are not only silly character
sets that one could make up (nods to the computer language “Whitespace”), and
real-world issues of what happens when the diehard Latin-5 people start sending
messages to the diehard JIS people, and the resulting N^2 testing matrix.
Thus, this section lets an implementation throw its hands up in the air and
scream wherever and whenever it wants, while giving a decent way to clearsign
Japanese text.
Jon
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