Keld,
At 12:03 AM 11/21/94, Keld J|rn Simonsen wrote:
I think that this means that we are just going to experimentalize
...
I do not think we should change the MIME labelling. I just think
that we may work further on the issue. And that there has been
Doing further work is fine. It's not the same as bypassing Mime, of
course, which is why it's fine. But doing it within this list has several
years of experience showing NO productive outcome. Hence, those with
interest and expertise should develop additional specifications for
charset= values and should pursue publishing them.
done work in the field, already published as RFCs.
a) The definition of a international character set scheme for
Internet mail is clearly within the scope of the ietf-822 list, as
Actually, I believe it no longer is. And the policy statement that you
cite earlier in your message solidifies that belief.
it was the initial reason for setting it up.
Yes it was. But several years of experience since that time have shown
that we are not able to 'solve' the problem or even to produce anything
useful with respect to it, other than the charset= parameter. At some
point, it's important to learn from our efforts. It's bad enough that this
issue delayed Mime by 6 months. So, again I ask that this topic be moved
to a list that is specialized on this topic, rather than burdening the
email community with it.
c) Since the adaption of MIME in June 92 there is a sinificant new
technology emerging, namely 10646/Unicode. 10646 was adapted as
It existed at the time and we were even told that it solved all the problem
because it had been made standard. In other words, it has been pushed at
us repeatedly. The consensus then -- and I doubt anything has changed --
is that use needs to PRECEDE our standardization. When 10646 has an
installed base that is so clearly dominant that we look silly to resist it,
THEN we should consider changing things. But we won't really need to,
then, since all the text/plain messages will be carrying charset-10646 (or
somesuch) and no one will care very much.
d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker
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dcrocker(_at_)mordor(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu