Re: [leafnode-list] Why was support for 8 bit characters in headers

["Peter N. M. Hansteen" <peter@xxxxxxxxx>]

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Matthias Andree wrote:
We don't want fetchnews to send garbage out, and you can use RFC-2047
encoded headers to send your å (aa) character out ("på" then looks like
this: "=?ISO-8859-15?Q?p=E5?=").
In the dk.* and no.* regional hierarchies at least, posting those munged
headers is the surest path available to killfiles and flame wars. The
reason is simple: All news readers will render something more or less 
readable, ie "Bjørnen sover, men snorker fælt" might at worst be
rendered as "Bj|rnen sover, men snorker f[lt". The result is at least
readable. Not so if the reader does not implement RFC2047 properly -
AFAIK most of them.

The very moment UTF-8 will be ratified as official RFC (it's in the
development process and an Internet Draft of the USEFOR group), we will
allow 8-bit characters again. Feel free to bug me should I miss the
future release of the RFC that supersedes RFC-1036.
You seem to be under the impression that UTF-8 is close to getting
accepted. I for one think this is naive at best.
And in the meantime, the problem is that in certain regional
hierarchies,
 We! Need! 8bit! support! Now!

- and we actually have a generally agreed upon solution for supporting
them. The moment you are waiting for is in all probability a long way
off -- there seems to be a number of unresolved issues regarding the
various Asian languages, and the nowhere near universal adoption of
the character set isn't exactly helping
issues; with UTF-8, characters are not always what they seem to be at
first glance. There have been security discussions some weeks or months
ago: about Cyrillic characters that look the same as Latin characters,
but have a different internal presentation. I believe that was about
domain colliding attacks.
Yes, there is quite a significant amounts of work to be done before all
those issues are resolved and implemented as anything approaching sane
solutions.
Throwing out 8-bit headers now in all probability means waiting several
years. If an UTF-8 based solution does indeed materialize, that is.
I reiterate - dropping support for 8 bit headers was premature.

--
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ 
http://www.datadok.no/

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