I really don't think that MIME has to be more specific about the
interpretation of the right-to-left languages than the ISO character set
specifications. I think we could get away with saying that the
directionality issue is addressed by a separate RFC, but I don't think
we can cite it by number without having it go through the standards
process. Someone should correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this
could set us back several years in the standards process.
As far as the canonical form of 8859-* is concerned, I would like to
hear from some more character set experts. Experts: In particular,
Ohta-san writes:
Excerpts from info-mime: 12-Jul-94 Re: Ambiguity on 8859-* and..
Masataka Ohta(_at_)necom830(_dot_)c (2181)
The problem has nothing to do with CTE.
It is perfectly possible to encode text with ISO 8859/1 with pure 7
bit as:
"ASCII_string" ESC - A "8859/1_right_part_string" ESC ( B "ASCII_string"
Can't I call the encoding "ISO-8859-1"? Or must MUAs supporting
"ISO-8859-1" be able to decode the above stateful encoding? Or,
shall we call the encoding "US-ASCII"? But, if we can call any 7
bit encoding "US-ASCII", why there is "ISO-2022-JP"?
To disambigufy, you can just simply say
announcer of 4/3 is, though omitted, assumed
I would like to hear what some more experts, particularly those whose
native language is expressed in the 8859-* character sets, believe about
this issue. I am simply not competent to judge. -- Nathaniel