ietf-822
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Re: An appeal for closure

1991-12-25 18:12:54
I would also object to dropping the 2022-jp material if it weren't going
to appear in another RFC right away. However, I don't think _anyone_ is
proposing that anything be done other than that.

However, Mark, you have to realize that there _is_ a formal difference between
2022-jp and 8859-n. The 8859-n documents are international standards. This
gives them a formal pedigree that as far as I can tell the 2022-jp facilities
lack. This is purely a formal point, but we've reached the phase of this
work where formal concerns must be dealt with. I don't much care for them
either, but it is part of the price you pay for doing things this way.

Mark is also correct in saying that use of 8859-n presently violates
mail standards. If anything, this makes accomodating 8859-n more important
than dealing with 2022-jp, which does not violate any existing standards
I'm aware of.

My proposal is simply that we limit the character set work in the base
MIME document to that which can be handled with minimal technical effort
on the part of MIME other than citing external formal standards for
character sets. This automatically restricts the base document to being
able to cite other presently standard RFCs and whatever international
standards we choose to adopt. That's part one of my proposal. The second
part is that we put the 2022-jp material and the mnemonic material into
separate documents (this necessitates zero changes to mnemonic and basically
just moves an appendix from MIME to a separate RFC) and start them on their
way down the track post haste. Even if political forces make these
documents experimental for now, it certainly eliminates any concern over
banning this character set or that -- since when has it been illegal t
use experimental protocols on the Internet?

                                Ned

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