1) I'd like to see a description of some of these character sets that
are being proposed like ISO-2022. Are they ftpable?
2) The internet tradition is of freely and conveniently available
documents. [And indeed many think the ISO documentation system is
suicidal]. I hope we all agree that any description of character
sets in the core RFC must be freely available. In fact if they are
not, and we still want to use them then they should be republished
as RFCs. And if that is not possible for copyright reasons we should
define our own standard.
RFCs describing character sets might have to be postscript only.
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Some people may react to this, saying that 2022 is not really
compatible with ASCII, and that RFC822-compliant programs are allowed
to interpret the data as strict ASCII. My answer to this is that
problems caused by this are sufficiently infrequent (near nil) that we
may ignore this.
If this is a proposal to change the rules for headers it would be
nice if it came with a detailed description plus implications. Most
of us will need some convincing -- the thought of a header
X-<stuff-in-japanese>: ...
is too scary.
Bob Smart