ietf-822
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Re: charsets and glyphs

1993-02-18 20:34:02
Keld,

    ---- Included message:

    
    > A word from another working group member, namely myself:
    > 
    
    Speak for yourself, Dave!

Please note that I opened my note by saying that I was, in fact,
only speaking for myself.
    
    This group was initially set up to enhance Internet mail with
    support for other character sets than ASCII. You can ask Phil
    Gross for verification.

Yes, Keld.  I was there, too, as were many others.  

As often happens, one sets out to solve a specific problem and
discovers others.  This is now and email group.  It has been for
18months, or so.  It's focus is on email formats.  One of its provisions
is for the reference to a body-part's character set.  In classic
engineering fashion, the email portion of the problem  appears to
be solved (until we have to specify special behavior for unusual
encodings, perhaps.)  The rest of the problem is with creating
and/or standardizing character sets, glyphs, or whatever.

When you want to pursue standardization of such a thing, you should.

You can, may and should pursue it through (1) registration with
IANA, and (2) formal working group, IETF, etc. approval.  This
path has been open to you for quite awhile and there is nothing
preventing it.  Many of us have encouraged you to follow it.

But pursuit of that effort isn't particularly special to email, so
I fail to see why discussion of it needs to take up this working
group's bandwidth.  (Yes, yes, I did note the need to review the
definition of Mime charset.  Well and good.)

    
    And there is a lot of character set expertise on the Internet
    field  gathered here. From the top of my head I have:

Then you should have no troubvle forming a Charset working group.
I'll be more than happy to faciliate the working group chartering.
I think the working group would be a good thing.

    That's a lot of good names! (I hope I have them right, and also

Many of those people also know quite a bit about SMTP.  That doesn't
mean we work on SMTP, here.

    Dave, I am a bit unhappy with your persistent tries to remove
    the character set issues from this WG. This is even more
    serious as you are holding official IETF positions like the standards
    manager position. Could I respectfully ask you to respect the charter
    of this WG?

The charter of this group was to work on email.  Definition of, and
standardization of, character sets isn't part of the charter.  I am
merely requesting that you form and pursue that topic in the usual
IETF manner.  

In other words, Keld, I am being so persistent because this topic continues
to be off the working group's primary topic.  That doesn't make it an
unimportant topic.  Just one that is being conducted in the wrong
place.  Note, for example, the general lack of progress in 2 years.
If you were a working group, you would have to specify some goals to
achieve and some milestones for achieving them.  This would make it
possible to hold the group accountable for its efforts.  Burying the
discussion in the middle of 822/Mime discussions does not accomplish
reasonable accountability or -- I will note -- facilitate your making
any progress.

Dave
    
    Keld

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