A group that is working on Vietnamese character set encoding has
mentioned to me that they plan to use part of the C0 space of US ASCII
for Vietnamese precomposed characters. They wish to be conformant
with the RFC-XXXX and RFC-ZZZZ requirements.
It isn't clear whether that is permitted or not by the RFC-XXXX
draft proposal. For SMTP, the characters CR, LF, and "." are known
to be reserved. I think it would help interoperability if RFC-XXXX
explicitly stated what C0 characters must have US ASCII semantics.
One could read RFC-822 and interpret it to mean that US ASCII meant
US ASCII, including control characters -- and hence that a MUA would
be within its rights to interpret them accordingly. On the other
hand, are there mailers that do that ? It seems counterproductive
to be more restrictive than we need to be.
Other thoughts ??
I'd like to see the RFC-XXXX draft revised to make this issue
clearer in the text of the draft, regardless of what the "correct"
interpretation turns out to be.
Thanks,
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil