Re: What's left before a new RFC?

[Marcel Waldvogel <[e-mail]>]

Marc Mutz wrote:

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>On Thursday 18 April 2002 10:17, Marcel Waldvogel wrote:
><snip>
>
>>For the Version and Comment headers, I propose to state that they are
>>UTF-8, but for interoperability, implementations SHOULD restrict
>>themselves to generate ASCII characters.
>>
><snip>
>
>I don't see the how having UTF-8 inside _ASCII_ Armor can be justified. The 
>problem is that the ascii armor is going to be used in non-8but-clean 
>environments. Else, you'd use the binary format, no?
>

One one side, we can consider cleartext signatures, which already can 
contain characters with the MSB set, and which are not necessarily 
armored for 8-bit cleanliness. Even there, the signature block is (among 
other things) ASCII-armored to not confuse the user (or his terminal) 
with weird chars.

There are multiple reasons for armoring non-7bit data:
a) The transport does not allow arbitrary 8bit sequences
b) The transport does not allow arbitrary "line" lengths
c) The transport does charset recoding, probably forth and back.

The headers that use UTF-8 are mostly for human consumption (I presume), 
and most modern non-8bit transports are of the form (b) or (c), which 
(1) should not harm typical headers nor (2) cause any damage, if they 
are slightly mangled (IMHO).


BTW: Does the "Version" header contain the product and version used 
("User-Agent"), or the version of the standard ("MIME-Version")? bis04 
seems to indicate the latter, but usage seems to be the former.

-Marcel