Now then, RFC822 will never be changed from what it says, so we could
easily refer to 822ascii and be entirely precise in RFC822bis by
reference to this excerpted section of RFC822.
Welcome to the world of ANSI and ISO standards :-(
The document referenced by RFC822, more correctly and completely
cited as X3.4-1968, is no longer available. It has been been superceded
by later editions, and ANSI does not stock obsolete versions of
Standards, nor do most libraries.
I say "ANSI *and ISO*" here, because ISO behaves the same way, and
one needs to be very careful about what one is referencing. I assume
that most ISO Member Bodies do too, but there are probably exceptions.
It is also easy to see how it got the informal code of USascii.
The organization that is now called ANSI went through an identity
crises a number of years ago in which it had trouble standardizing its
own name. It started that period as "ASA" (the "American Standards
Association"), went through "USASA" or something quite similar, and
finally ended up as "ANSI", with maybe an addition version in between.
This was over a period of two or three years (aside to anyone who
happens to be involved in advising registration authorities: reminding
them about this period is probably not considered funny by senior ANSI
staff, but should be considered if rules are proposed that would
constrain name bindings for all time :-) ).
Anyway, these name changes caused the parallel designations of
national standards to go from "American Standard..." to "United States
of America Standard..." to "American National Standard..."
One could have redesignated the acronyms along the way, but many
(probably most) weren't, so while ASA->USASA->...->ANSI occurred,
"ASCII" (which started under the original regime and name) stayed
"ASCII". But *that* is how the "informal code of USascii" happened.
"ASCII" as actually part of the title.
Then, with the most recent revision, someone, in my opinion, screwed
up and changed the name of the standard without changing the numeric
designation. This was done to make symmetry with "8-bit ASCII", a
separate standard which corresponds to ISO8859-1 (X3.134.1 sticks in my
mind, but that might easily be wrong). That the name has been changed
is not debatable; current ANSI catalogue lists it as "7-bit ASCII".
We should also cite it the
same way in RFC822bis as in RFC822. That should not leave any wiggle
room for anyone to miss what is intended.
If you really want to do this -- there are a few characteristics of
the 1968 version that don't precisely correspond to today's common
usage, then it might be best for someone to go check the Protocol
Handbook and be sure that it contains text identical to X3.4-1968, then
cite that, forget about citing "X3.4" and use "822ASCII" or, better
yet, "822CII" as the code.
If I were IAB or the RFC editor, I might take exception to citing the
old Protocol Handbook as the reference source for some important
characteristic of a proposed new standard in 1991. But I'm not,
obviously. Someone might ask for an advisory opinion on that, however.
I recommend against USASCII--other than looking strange, it has all of
the disadvantages attributed to "ASCII", plus just being wrong.
Are there other versions of "ascii" in fact, or
are these all just some sort of techno-mythology?
Mythology and informal shorthand ways of expressing the same sorts of
concepts as might have been expressed as ASCIIbis (ISO Latin-1 ?) in
another community. ISCII (ISO Code...) has been used, but no one seems
to know whether it refers to 646, 10646, 8859-1, 8859-2,..., or a
variety of others. And then one hears about things like UK-ASCII, an
oxymoron if there ever was one.
--john
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