Subject: Email addresses in SDP

From: Mark Handley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 14:37:22 -0500

I'm just trying to clean up the last few modifications to SDP that the
IESG requested.  One comment was the SDP email field current allows
the free text phrase (eg "Mark Handley" in the from field for this
message) to be in ISO 10646, which is not permissible in RFC 822 where
it has to be plain ASCII.

So there are two obvious solutions:

- leave the SDP spec as it is (allowing ISO 10646) but add a warning
  that some email addresses would have to use RFC 2047 encoded words if
  they were transfered directly from SDP to email.

- change the SDP spec to only allow RFC 822 compliant addresses.

The former is more in keeping with the rest of SDP, but I believe the
latter is probably more useful if we want to be able to use the email
field in a machine readable manner.

Anyone have an opinion on this?

Cheers,
	Mark

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From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 17:36:57 -0500

>   they were transfered directly from SDP to email.

Any decent email program should automatically convert 10646 to RFC 2047,
without any user intervention. Thus, I don't see why SDP should be
crippled.

> field in a machine readable manner.

Since this is a one-to-one translation without ambiguity, I'd prefer the
more readable and clean 10646 approach. I'm sure if you put down an
address in a Unicode text file (or even in a 8859-1 HTML file), you are
not going to writing it using RFC 2047 - that would defeat the whole
purpose. Thus, email addresses and URLs always will have to be
transcoded according to the local protocol conventions. SDP uses one,
RFC 822 another. As long as there's no ambiguity in the translation, I
don't see the harm.