Re: Getting RFC 2047 encoding right

On 12/8/03 at 12:40 PM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:

>>On 12/8/03 at 10:43 AM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
>>
>>>Nope, user agents SHOULD NOT decode RFC 2047 except for display purposes.
>>
>>Do you consider sorting a "display purpose"? How about searching 
>>given some user input?
>
>seems fine to me.

Well, in that case I think you're being a bit naive when you say 
earlier, "Decoding is only supposed to happen prior to display or 
printing, not prior to storage." Requiring a search to do 2047 (and 
therefore likely 822) parsing on each and every searched message in a 
large message store is much too processor intensive in some 
environments. Now, maybe that would require a shadow database of 
pre-parsed messages along with the un-parsed 2047 fields to use in 
replies, but that starts to become a significant burden too. In 
either case, allowing the user to edit the subject of a reply 
probably means de-coding and re-encoding the 2047, which runs into 
exactly the kind of problem that Arnt was getting at in his original 
message.

It would be nice to think that "decode only for display purposes" 
would be a complete answer. It's not.

pr
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Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102