From: Masataka Ohta
<mohta(_at_)necom830(_dot_)cc(_dot_)titech(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp>
To: sdorner(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com (Steve Dorner)
Cc: umerin(_at_)mse(_dot_)kyutech(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp,
Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu, moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu,
ietf-822(_at_)dimacs(_dot_)rutgers(_dot_)edu
In-Reply-To: <v03000a06ab0377819e38(_at_)[192(_dot_)17(_dot_)16(_dot_)12]>;
from "Steve Dorner" at Dec 1, 94 7:07 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
It was not feasability that was under discussion. It was whether or not it
is safe to dispense with character set labels, be they iso-8859-1 or
iso-2022-jp or whatever. Nathaniel's point was that, until everyone is
using the same character set (be it unicode or iso-2022 or some other
universal character set), it will be necessary to label the character set
that is being used.
As the only ISO standard on which internationalized text encoding is
built upon is ISO 2022, there is no reason to use other character sets.
IETF is successful because it believes that current (including current
*non-Japaneese*) use and interoperability are good reasons.
If you believe that ISO standards should control everything, why are
you spending your time in IETF WGs? Why aren't you out there
implementing or trying to improve X.400 and leaving us in peace?
...
But, I know this specification of MIME is just vapor.
You seem to know a lot of things which others disagree with, don't you?
I'm not saying that 2022 isn't feasible (nor am I now saying that it is).
What I am saying is that, until some character set is used universally, it
will be necessary for utilities to have a way of discovering which
character set is being used in a particular message. That character set
may even be ISO-2022-JP; fine, no problem. So long as it's labelled.
With 10 years of experience, we know that, as ISO-2022-JP is used
universally in Japan, there are no points to label it.
Even if it were true that ISO-2022-JP were the only character set in
use everywhere in Japan, which I don't believe for a minute, Japan in
not the whole world.
...
Masataka Ohta
Donald