Excerpts from info-mime: 12-Jul-94 Ambiguity on 8859-* and bi-..
Masataka Ohta(_at_)necom830(_dot_)c (533)
It seems to me that thee definitions on ISO-8859-* are ambiguous
in RFC1521 and draft-ietf-822ext-mime-imb-00. Perhaps, ISO-8859-*
is intended to be used with 8 bit without designating escape sequences.
But there is no such description.
There's no such description, nor do I really think one is needed. There
is to my knowledge nothing ambiguous about the canonical data format,
which includes non-ASCII octets, which means that you can't use it
without worrying about the normal transfer-encoding problems inherent in
any non-ascii data, which is treated in the spec at great length.
The concern about bi-directional text is a valid one, but I think it's
beyond the scope of the MIME spec. While it might be nice to cite RFC
1556, I think this raises procedural problems, because (as I understand
it) an RFC that is an Internet standard has to avoid making reference to
non-standard RFC's. -- Nathaniel