Subject: Re: [idn] Re: 7 bits forever!

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 1 Apr 2002 08:35:14 -0000

Claus Faerber writes:
> D. J. Bernstein <[email-masked]> schrieb/wrote:
> > I'm not saying that Quoted-Printable had no short-term benefits for its
> > short-term costs. I'm saying that, viewed from our long-term perspective
> > eleven years later, the failure to require 8-bit transparency was an
> > amazingly stupid decision.
> From our present perspective, that's true. Back then, it might
> have been the best solution.

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,
surely you understand that #2 would have been vastly better than #1.

> Further, remember that the first MIME standards date back to 1992.
> Back then, Unicode was brand-new and UTF-8 only came with the 2.0
> version in 1996. Without UTF-8, you just could not even think
> about using Unicode in message headers; and without Unicode, you
> could not solve the charset-labelling problem.

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. Third, even without Unicode, there were several
solutions to the character-set labelling problem.

Anyway, none of this is relevant to IETF's acceptance of 7-bit garbage
in 1991, and none of it is relevant to IETF's acceptance of 7-bit
garbage today.

> The movement towards UTF-8 everywhere is quite new.

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.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2002 12:31:59 -0500

On Mon, 01 Apr 2002 08:59:19 PST, Einar Stefferud said:
> It is indeed unfortunate the the DRUMS WG did not find a way to solve 
> the 8-bit SMTP problem, but now is the time to get to it.  There 
> should not be too much 7-bit SMTP code to fix by now.

One hidden gotcha is that although most MTA's are probably either 8-bit-clean
or fairly easily rendered so, there is *NOT* a widespread deployment of the
RFC3030 ESMTP extensions.  As a result, you still get bit by the "need a
CRLF pair every 998 characters" problem.
-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Senior Engineer
				Virginia Tech