Keld,
RFC-MIME is going to go out before ISO-10646 happens (knock on wood).
Are you saying that RFC-CHAR is intended to be finalised in the same way
and published as a real RFC before ISO-10646 happens ?? I had earlier
thought that you were going to defer publication of RFC-CHAR until
ISO-10646 happened officially and you could include it.
Who knows if RFC-CHAR will ever be a RFC :-)
But the answer is: yes it was my wish to get RFC-CHAR out
together with RFC-MIME, this was also the plan of the 822ext meeting
in Santa Fe as far as I know.
RFC-CHAR is not really dependent on 10646, it just uses the long
descriptive naming from this document. But this is the same naming
that ISO also uses in other ducuments e.g. 10367, and the 10646
draft document is the best place to get all of the names.
This is also the reason that there are so small differences between
the August and the December drafts in the charset tables: the
very drastic changes in the 10646 to accomodate Unicode did not
influence the charset definitions in RFC-CHAR at all.
So the RFC-CHAR has been technically stable since August for the
interesting part of the charset definitions, including US-ASCII
and the 8859-X. And this is what is interesting to RFC-MIME.
I would not expect those specifications to change technically,
no matter how the new 10646 would look like. So I think the RFC is
technically valuable and ready to publish now. In what form and
with what status I would leave to the people-in-the-know.
I would like to see what the new DIS looks like, tho, but that should
be available to me in the next week or two - I have already got
documents saying ISO DIS 10646-1992(E) on it, but miss the
common character tables.
Keld