Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu writes: > you could *NOT* trust that all the systems > between here and there were 8-bit-clean 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. If Keith Moore, Dave Crocker, Paul Vixie, et al. hadn't been so blind, they would have required 8-bit transparency for the long term, and then evaluated the costs and benefits of short-term 7-bit kludges in that framework. Probably the result would have been long-term 8-bit with no short-term kludges. Conceivably it would have been long-term 8-bit plus optional short-term Quoted-Printable. Either way, it would have been vastly better than what actually happened. Do you want to be having this discussion again in twenty years, with 8-bit problems still not fixed? > there were a *LARGE* number of systems that broke badly if they > were handed 8 bit data. Let's look at the facts. John Klensin claimed in an ietf-smtp message dated 26 Feb 91 08:40:04-EST that there were mail servers ``not robust against that particular form of misbehavior.'' Robert Ullmann publicly asked for proof of this claim. Klensin dodged the question. Similarly, Keith Moore claimed in a comp.mail.mime message, message ID 199710102108.RAA13469@spot.cs.utk.edu, that ``core-dumping was a commonly observed failure mode in the early 1990s.'' I publicly asked for proof of this claim. Moore dodged the question. Mail servers discarding characters? Yes. Mail servers stripping the 8th bit? Yes. Mail servers crashing? Not a single shred of evidence. Similarly, expanding from mail to all protocols: Rick Wesson claimed in an IDN WG message dated Sun, 24 Dec 2000 16:44:39 -0800 that ``there is a lot of embedded systems out there that would crash-and-burn if they received a reply in utf8.'' I asked for proof: Can you please identify the systems, explain how they use domain names, and say what exactly you mean by ``crash-and-burn''? We need this information if we're going to accurately assess the cost of upgrading the world to support IDNs. Naturally, Wesson dodged the question. I will readily agree that there has been an unverified report of a UTF-8 crash of an obsolete version of the Netscape mailer under Solaris. If that report is accurate then those users will have to upgrade. > BIND, which by default restricts it [ ... ] > Why does it get restricted? [ bogus rationalization snipped ] The actual history, as I mentioned in another message, is as follows. People discovered several years ago that sendmail would blindly feed DNS PTR results to the shell, so attackers could take over the computer by putting some special characters, such as |<>, into PTR records. The BIND people panicked and disabled all non-letter-digit-hyphen characters at every spot they could think of in their DNS client library. This isn't an 8-bit issue; it does just as much damage to underscores. > Let's take as an example the "native language" encoding of my name: > From: Valdis Kl=?iso8859-4?Q?=BA?=tnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> Wow. How do you pronounce that? ``Hi, I'm Valdis Klee-kwals-question- mark-iso-eighty-eight-fifty-nine-dash-four-question-mark-kyoo-question- mark-equals-bah-question-mark-equal-stun-ieks''? Have you considered changing your name? In all seriousness: Wouldn't you like to see a world where the same character encoding is used for the name and the address and the message body and so on, so that simple copying doesn't screw up the display? ---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago