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Re: a few short notes

2004-02-03 11:18:11


Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:


Paul Robinson writes:

On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 01:40:41PM +0100, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:

 It's what 822 uses.


And we're having this discussion because we know 822 to be flawed. Therefore, your point is irrelevant.


I beg to differ.

1. Even if 822's choice of charset were flawed, we still need interoperation during the (probably very long) transition from 822 to Mail-NG. It must be possible to write gateways.

If the new default were something like UTF-8, it would be easy as it is a superset
of ASCII so all existing 822 address are still valid.

The transition back could to 822 format could be as simple as using
the HTTP %<hex> values that we all see in URLs now. A %<hex>
value is just as easy for me to read out loud as a non English name
mugged into ASCII.

MUAs will catch up quickly once adopted.


2. While 822 is flawed in many ways, I don't see what would be gained by (picking an example at random) using Cyrillic characters in the message-id production I see on page 23 of RFC 2822. Latin seems just as good and just as bad as Cyrillic there.

Message-id is not the same as email address.  I would agree.

Unicode is a special character repertoire, because it includes all the characters that are used today. Open a newspaper, any newspaper: The characters you see are in Unicode, or in the pipeline.

US-ASCII is special because of the need for interoperation/gatewaying with 822.

Off-hand, I don't see any other special character repertoires.

Arnt


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