ietf-822
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re: more content-charset stuff

1991-10-25 12:28:51
On Thu, 24 Oct 91 13:37:39 PDT, Neil Katin wrote:
We've gone over this territory many times; I suspect that consensus
will not appear via email, since the loudest people tend to drown
out everyone else.

I am totally disinterested in any standards that are not decided by e-mail,
since only those who can afford to attend IETF meetings en masse go to IETF
meetings.

It used to be, up until a few years ago, that protocol design decisions were
done by e-mail.  Now what we have are protocol design by coup d'etat, with
IETF meetings undoing months of e-mail work because critical people felt it
was unnecessary to waste their limited travel budgets on what seemed a
foregone conclusion.

I have tried to do email decisions in other fora, but without any luck.
My opinion is that you can actually only reach conclusions and take
decisions on face-to-face meetings, unless you do some very carefull
polling.

I think the decision making on this list is an example of how
this does not work. I find quite often that I do not understand how
certain conclusions were reached. Maybe it is because I am not 
native English speaking, but anyhow, some things are odd...

One advantage of having a separate content-charset: header is that
you are not restricted in the characters to use in the charset
name. There are no meta character restrictions.

For instance the header proposal from Keith Moore cannot use the
charset names of RFC-CHAR, or at least only some restricted
names, because of the special characters excluded.

Keld

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