From: Einar Stefferud <Stef=mime(_at_)nma(_dot_)com>
Date: Sun, 26 Dec 1993 00:06:55 -0800
I would like to reinforce John's comments about IETF not being in the
business of prejudging ISO standards that are in progress.
ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 is not a work in progress. It is published. It
is ready for use, and people are using it. The earlier reference to
a developing PDTR to establish a character/glyph model is indeed a work
in progress but has no bearing on the interchange of 10646 encoded data.
As I read the many discussions of ISO-10646/UNICODE, I find that the
work is still not fully baked.
I suppose you would find MIME to be fully baked, eh? Perhaps you would
be so kind as to explain your criteria for bakedom.
I am not willing to proceed further with standardizing MIME use of
either ISO10646 or UNICODE until it is fully baked.
What makes you sure ASCII is baked?
This current situation is exactly what we were worried about the last
time ISO-10646 was withheld from MIME adoption.
At that time 10646 was in DIS, and you were not apparently aware that a
second DIS existed. Don't you think things are bit different now?
My personal opinion is that ISO blew it on their 10646/UNICODE meld,
adn that they need to go away again and fix it, NOW!
I've heard similar sentiment expressed about MIME, especially from
certain SGML partisans. As in that case, I dismisssed the complaint
as vacuous. Perhaps if you would be so kind to be more specific
about your complaints something good could come of it.
Regards,
Glenn Adams