Reply to: RE>>Proposals for 10646/Unic
David, one small point. Your quoted text cited Mime as not listing
support for Unicode. While this is strictly correct, it also is
misleading. The Mime document chose not to attempt any sort of
extensive support list. It explicitly lists a very, very minimal
set and refers, then, to the IANA for registration of any additional
character sets. Hence, the question is whether there has been attempt
to register Unicode with IANA for Mime.
I gather your documents are likely to be candidates for just such
registration, which is good.
Oops, I didn't realize the original message was public or I would have replied
publicly before. I already replied to Dave Crocker in private. This point is
true, and I will change the documents to be more precise.
I'm afraid that one of his proposal, ISO-10646-UTF7, is effectively of new
CTE rather than a new charset.
UTF-7 is somewhat like a content transfer encoding. We briefly considered
proposing it as such, but 1) in MIME, new content transfer encodings are
explicitly and strongly discouraged, and 2) it seems like it would only be
useful for 16 bit character sets which have 7 bit ASCII as a subset, of which
there are not many. So, we made it a transformation format of 10646/Unicode
instead.
Of course, because of Han unification, UNICODE is not a charset of MIME.
I don't quite understand this. According to the original MIME document (RFC
1341), 10646/Unicode was not listed as an initial charset for MIME was because
of the controversy between ISO 10646 and Unicode. No mention was made of Han
unification as a reason for excluding 10646/Unicode. Now that the
10646/Unicode unification is complete, there is no reason not to proceed.
David Goldsmith
david_goldsmith(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com