Frank Ellermann wrote:
Dave Crocker wrote:
As for I8N, I believe that doing more in the document requires some
rather compelling consensus among the community -- ie, you folk.
Proposed text, insert in chapter 6 between "Security" and "IANA":
Internationalization
The core email architecture is still based on US-ASCII headers in
message/rfc822 objects including any MIME part headers. Other
charsets and the indication of languages in headers require US ASCII
compatible MIME encodings as specified in RFC 2047 and RFC 2231.
It may be worth to explicitly state that, although the *values* of
some headers may be expressed in different languages an possibly
encoded using different charsets, the headers *names* are *not* to be
translated into different languages. Mail clients who understand any
standard name MAY display its translation instead, provided it is
clear to users what they do (e.g. no translated source views.)
In addition, some mail clients translate IMAP special-use folders
names _on the server_, resulting in a loss of interoperability with
clients that expect the de facto standard names. If it were possible
to state that *any* translation should be carried out by the client on
the fly, it may help refraining the temptation to internationalize too
much...