D. J. Bernstein <djb(_at_)cr(_dot_)yp(_dot_)to> schrieb/wrote:
No. The failure to require 8-bit transparency was inexcusable. Every
approach that failed to require 8-bit transparency could have been
dramatically improved. Consider, for example, these three approaches:
(1) Quoted-Printable;
(2) Quoted-Printable plus ``you must handle unencoded 8-bit data too'';
(3) pure 8-bit without this 7-bit garbage.
Whether or not you understand that #3 would have been better than #2,
... which is irrelevant today as quoted-printable is widely
supported ...
surely you understand that #2 would have been vastly better than #1.
You're implying that we've had solution number (1). This is wrong,
it is more like:
(4) Quoted-Printable plus 'you may handle unencoded 8bit data'.
As of today, most systems *do* handle 8bit data without problems.
So there's no point in arguing that a "must handle" would have
improved the situation.
You can argue, of course, whether the autoconversion from 8bit to
qp is a good thing. On one hand, it does preserve compatibility
with old 8th bit murderer systems, on the other hand, it is often
unnecessary a imposes a risk of corruption of these message.
Get your facts straight. First, UTF-8 was introduced years before 1996,
although under another name. Second, even without knowing about UTF-8,
people _were_ thinking about Unicode in headers, and proposed several
workable approaches.
Yeah, me might have "UTF-1 garbage", or even a more obsolete
Unicode Transformation format.
Third, even without Unicode, there were several solutions to the
character-set labelling problem.
Any of these would have to been just as ugly as RFC 2047 is if the
UA does not understand the label. So what?
Again, get your facts straight. The ``movement'' started with X-Open,
Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson a decade ago. RFC 2277, requiring UTF-8
support for all text on the Internet, is four years old.
You have to look at the software that actually supports Unicode,
not about programmatic decisions for future standards. One or two
years ago, UTF-8 support in actual software was an exception. Most
software has only recently been updated to support UTF-8. Even
today, a lot of software does not support or is not configured for
UTF-8 by default.
Claus
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