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Re: 16/32-bit charsets and MIME-encoding

1993-02-11 16:06:15
I'll wear two different hats, in responding to this:

    ---- Included message:

    Subject:     Re: 16/32-bit charsets and MIME-encoding
    From:        John C Klensin <KLENSIN(_at_)infoods(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu>

    Dan Oscarsson writes, in part...
    
    >With the expected character coding to use
    >in the future in MIME to be ISO 10646 instead of ISO 8859-*, ascii or othe
                  rs
    >as character coding in message transfer.
    
    Have we agreed on this?  

As a working group member:  I most certainly have NOT agreed and my own
reading of the message traffic is that there is far too much debate
continuing to call it anything close to consensus.  From the technical
side, I don't see tht there is nearly enough community experience with
10646, nor enough email experience with it, to begin to consider
replacing the current, stable base of ASCII/8859-*.

Let me emphasize the last part of that last sentence:  I believe that
playing with the operational stability (even while I agree with the
complaints about its functional deficiencies) would be very, very, very
ill-advised.

As an area directory worrying about the standards process:  A spec which
undergoes major modification after reaching Proposed Standard is
subject to re-starting the standards process and is NOT appropriate
as a candidate for Draft.  From my "member" opinion paragraphs, above,
you might suspect that I would view changing the underlying characterset
for Internet mail to be a major change.  I do.

Dave

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