I am going to indulge in a moment of pique (irritation) which has been
building for some time. It is in response to a number of people's
comments, so Harld, please don't take it personally:
There is an aggressive concern that leaving out citation of a particular
character set, or a particular encoding algorithm (content sub-type) from
MIME will somehow limit the ability to use that character set or
sub-type.
This is an entirely incorrect concern. The fact that it is incorrect has
been explained a number of times, apparently without having any effect
upon people's views or comments. What is it going to take to get folks
to understand that the purpose of IANA is to allow later registration of
additional items, such as character sets and information encoding
rules?
I also would appreciate some explaination for the intractability of
folks about this issue. Why do you hold this false beliefe that failure
to have citations included will cripple MIME's utility?
Dave