Dave Crocker writes:
Actually, I believe it no longer is. And the policy statement that you
cite earlier in your message solidifies that belief.
I am puzzled about IETF procedures. Can the scope of a IETF WG
just be changed without notice to the group? Can the scope of
an IETF group be changed just because some IETF officer (I believe
you got some hat from IETF, Dave) says so?
Would that mean that the ietf-charsets group is dissolved, as
they will not be able to produce IETF standards that IAB will approve?
Are groups not notified if they are disbanded?
it was the initial reason for setting it up.
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.
I am not very happy with that attitude.
I can see that for Americans, this does not matter that much,
they seldom use more than ASCII (as I almost exclusively use ascii
in my Englisg written communication - and I deal a lot with character
sets!).
But for other places, writing languages using other characters than
in ASCII, would that attitude/policy not have severe consequenses?
Like two or more competing charater sets or encodings where
users of one character set will not be able to send leglible
plain text to others? For example between iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-10?
Or some ISO-10646 encoding and iso-8859-2?
One thing I love in internet mail is that I can communicate
with everybody - I do not need to care that people will get my
messages in a format they will be able to understand.
This would probably always be the case for ASCII messages,
but I would also like that to be true for my own language, Danish,
and for other people of the world speaking their native language.
Keld