Dear members of ietf-822,
I'm very surprised to hear that there is a movement to restrict
character sets used in plain(w/o MIME encoded) internet messages to
us-ascii only.
The problematic part of the draft follows:
(quoted from `draft-ietf-822ext-mime-imb-01.txt')
> Default RFC 822 messages without a MIME Content-Type header
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> are taken by this protocol to be plain text in the US-ASCII
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> character set, which can be explicitly specified as:
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> This default is assumed if no Content-Type is specified. In
> the presence of a MIME-Version header field, a receiving User
> Agent can also assume that plain US-ASCII text was the
> sender's intent. Plain US-ASCII text must still be assumed in
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> the absence of a MIME-Version specification, but the sender's
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> intent might have been otherwise.
If such a protocol becomes the standard, almost all related software
currently widely used in Japan should be replaced and the cost of that
is unpredictable. As a matter of fact, such a scheme cannot be
acceptable in Japan.
RFC-822 *DOES NOT* formally specifies the encoding scheme of character
sets. In Japan, Japanese text messages are encoded in ISO-2022-JP
(defined as RFC-1468) which is based on ISO 2022 and this scheme is
supported not only on News/Mail systems but also supported on various
tools like editors, less, grep, awk, roff etc.
Note that this encoding scheme *CONFORMS TO* RFC-822 so that there
is *NO NEED* to modify related software which completely conform to
RFC-822.
Also, since ISO-2022-JP is based on ISO 2022, It's straightforward
to extend ISO-2022-JP for multilingual texts(cf. RFC-1554: ISO-2022-JP-2).
To restrict the default charcter set used in plain text to ASCII and to
force the use of MIME encoding for the users of other character sets is,
therefore, benefits *NOTHING* for *both* ASCII/non-ASCII users. And in
Japan, it's impossible to accept such proposal because we are currently
using large amount of japanized tools already.
Regards,
Yoshio Kuniyoshi
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Yoshio KUNIYOSHI
Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, Yokohama, Japan.
E-mail: yoshio(_at_)nak(_dot_)math(_dot_)keio(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp
Tel: +81-45-563-1151 ext.3765(dial in)
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