It was never spelled out in the minutes or anything like that, but
went something like:
From the minutes of November 91 meeting in Santa Fe:
(d) Character set issues
The Working Group specified the definition of a character set
for the purposes of quad-x to be a unique mapping of a byte
stream to glyphs, a mapping which does not require external
profiling information.
It seems to me that IETF correctly recognizes character set issues.
It should be noted that in the document titled "The Unicode Character
Encoding Standard" prepared by the Unicode consortium, the followings
are written:
Glyphs are not defined by the Unicode standard.
The Unicode standard defines only how characters are interpreted,
not how glyphs are rendered.
Actually, Unicode does not give a unique mapping of a byte stream to glyphs
without external profiling information.
Thus, we can't use Unicode to solve character set issues.
Masataka Ohta