Re: PROPOSAL: i74: Encoding for non-ASCII headers

Jamie Lokier wrote:

> An issue I have with RFC2047 is it seems to imply every "proper"
> implementation of a HTTP reciever, which does something with received
> TEXT (such as display it), needs to have a _large_ table of known
> character set names and conversion routines.

No, by design MIME works if the other side has no clue what it is.

It would then see gibberish like =?us-ascii*en-GB?Q?hello_world?=
and don't know that this an odd way to say "hello world".  It is
not forced to know what "encoded words" are, and if it knows this
it is not forced to support each and every charset.
 
> may I suggest that it be recommended to _only_ designate the 
> "utf-8", "iso-8859-1" and "us-ascii" character set in RFC2047
> encodings in HTTP?

It's an idea, but I think we're not forced to explicitly say this.

If some communities use koi8-r or some older charset popular in
JP this is the same issue as in ordinary Web browsers or e-mail:

I cannot read Cyrl or Jpan scripts, it is irrelevant from my POV
how that is encoded.  

 Frank

Received on Friday, 28 March 2008 12:10:09 UTC