Re: [idn] Re: 7 bits forever!

[Einar Stefferud <stef@nma.com>]

Hi John -- My thesis is that the problem lies now in the SMTP 
standards, where the current "Send 8-bits" problem has always 
resided.  The MIME working group could not solve that problem, and so 
did not, but it made mail work since its deployment, which was the 
objective in the MIME WG.  inside the RFC822 Body there is only one 
way to handle 8-bit data, and that is to tag it, and bag it.  Even if 
you can transmit 8-bit data without encoding it in the body of an 
SMTP message, it needs to be tagged and delimited in the body.

MIME Quoted-Printable was designed to be a work-around-damage 
solution at the time, and was not design to remove the need for 
handling 8-bit data in SMTP.

So, my only point is that it appears that some work needs to be done 
in the SMTP standards, and beating up on the MIME WG does not compute 
given this observation.

That is all...  Just trying to shift the focus of this thread to 
where someone might think of a way to solve the current problem.

In the meantime, Thankfully, Mail still works, which was the MIME 
objective for Quoted-Printable.

Cheers;-)....\Stef


At 12:41 PM -0500 4/1/02, John C Klensin wrote:
>Stef,
>
>Either I misunderstand your message, or we have a bit of a
>disconnect.
>
>The SMTP extension "8BITMIME" was specified fairly early in the
>game.  My impression is that it is fairly widely deployed and
>used, possibly to the extent that most non-ASCII traffic is
>moving that way; someone on this list (or the SMTP extensions
>one) may have some numbers.  Where it is deployed, MIME is still
>required to label ("tag") the data -- one can still not tell one
>sort of 8bit character from another, and there is, I think,
>still much more traffic on the network in ISO 8859-N variants,
>or IS 2022-based systems, or local character sets than there is
>UTF-8 encoding of Unicode -- but quoted-printable (or base64)
>are not, unless the mail store or mail retrieval implementation
>cannot deal with 8bit materials.
>
>       john
>
>
>--On Monday, 01 April, 2002 08:59 -0800 Einar Stefferud
><stef@nma.com> wrote:
>
>  > Not to pick on Dan's particular message.
>  > It was just the last one to provide me with a handy response
>  > point.
>  >
>  > Looking back, the original 1990-1991 argument was between
>  > "Just send 8 bits" with no tagging of the content, vs "tagging
>  > and bagging" to deal with the fact that 8-bit at that time
>  > would break too many systems, and the problem of needing to
>  > tag the types of text characters that were contained in RFC822
>  > message bodies.
>  >
>  > But, as there were two problems to solve (8 bit SMTP ) and
>  > (tagging RFC822 content), the decision was made (after a very
>  > long and very heated argument) to split that problem according
>  > to the boundaries of SMTP and RFC822.
>  >
>  > In fact, the two problems were and still are totally distinct.
>  >
>  > The RFC822 solution group produced MIME with Quoted-Printable
>  > as its charter specified, to assure interworkability as soon
>  > as possible.
>  >
>  > The 8-bit folks did not do anything then or since to require
>  > 8-bit carriage.
>  >
>  > So, it is time for a working group to solve this problem.
>  >
>  > It is not going to help anyone to argue about the past, as in
>  > fact, it was very rational at the time, and one side of the
>  > problem was ignored as soon as quoted printable relieved the
>  > immediate pressure for an SMTP solution.
>  >
>  > So, now is a good time for some constructive discussion of
>  > ways to solve the charset problems, hopefully with some useful
>  > charset tagging tools for the non-RFC-822 parts of the SMTP
>  > envelope.  (But I do not mean to specify either the work or
>  > the results at this point.)
>  >
>  > 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.
>  >
>  > Cheers...\Stef
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  > At 8:35 AM +0000 4/1/02, D. J. Bernstein wrote:
>  >> Claus Faerber writes:
>  >>  > D. J. Bernstein <djb@cr.yp.to> 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
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >