USEFOR (was: Re: Using iso-8859-15 with Emacs21 & Gnus)

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:

> Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:
>> Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:
>
>>> No.  USEFOR does not specify any default charset.  
>
>> Yes it does.  UTF-8 for headers and US-ASCII for the body.
>
> Why on earth would you require UTF-8 handling for the headers and not take
> advantage of it for the body?

Because leaving out the Content-Type header for messages with UTF-8
content in the body cause problems for pre-standard clients and has no
real advantages.

The situation is very different for headers, where both the option of
qp-encoding UTF-8 content in the headers and the option of not
qp-encoding UTF-8 content in the header will cause real problems for
pre-standard newsreaders.  And the option of qp-encoding the header
will cause problems on pre-standard servers.

The cases are not parallel, since MIME does not allow you to specify
character set in headers without QP or BASE64 encoding the content.
In the body, the two functions are ortogonal.

I agree that USEFOR in general are doing too much design and too
little standardization, but I think they took the least bad option in
this case.