--On Wednesday, August 26, 2020 17:42 -0400 John Levine
<johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In article <EA8AA46EB86616943490A217@PSB> you write:
>>> The charset is currently unnamed, as far as I can see: it's
>>> the UTF-7 variant in section 5.1.3 of RFC 3501.
>>
>> I have not been following IMAP work carefully in recent years
>> (others here may be able to easily fill in the blanks) but my
>> impression is that, as Unicode encoded in UTF-8 has taken over
>> as the generally preferred form for transmission of non-ASCII
>> characters over the Internet, UTF-7 has generally fallen out
>> of use even if it has not been explicitly deprecated. ...
>
> Everything you say is true, but I can say from experience that
> even though the RFC 6855 UTF-8 character encodings are a lot
> better than the mutant UTF-7 in RFC 3501, in practice hardly
> anyone implements the UTF-8 encodings yet, but everyone has
> the old UTF-7.
That is obviously the knowledge I lacked. If it is use in
situations in which having a defined charset code would help,
then go for it.
> Since that this bad encoding is well defined and widely
> implemented, I can't object to giving it a name. Perhaps
> UTF-7UGH.
Perhaps that is one of the more mild ways of sending a useful
signal. UTF-7-IsBadNews also comes to mind :-(
And we should probably consider formally deprecating the thing,
not because it will cause faster adoption of UTF-8 but because
it would give us a place to explain why it is not a very good
idea going forward.
john
john
