ietf-822
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Re: Character set Detail Considered Harmful

1991-12-20 15:02:30
Excerpts from mail: 20-Dec-91 Re: Character set Detail Co.. Dave
Crocker(_at_)Mordor(_dot_)Stan (1523)

Your document provides a place to declare character set.  I believe that
there is nothing to prevent the folks out there from citing whatever
character set they want, in each message.  (X-myset, X-ISO-10646, or
whatever.)  

Yeah, well, maybe.  But I think that "X-ISO-8859-1" is kind of offensive
-- there's hardly anything experimental about it, which is what "X-"
usually implies.  How about the following compromise proposal:

RFC-XXXX defines a place to put the "charset" value, as it does now.  It
defines "US-ASCII' as the string to use for expressing, well, US-ASCII. 
It says other values may be used among consenting mail systems, and
SUGGESTS that the names given to the character sets should be taken from
RFC-CHAR.  End of story.  That is functionally equivalent to the current
draft, I believe.  Would it be satisfactory to all parties?