ietf-822
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Re: suggestion

1994-12-03 06:54:49
Yamamoto-san,

Thank you for your effort to clarify the current difficulties and to create
a basis for making some progress.

I would like to clarify the last item in your message:

At 1:06 AM 12/2/94, Kazuhiko Yamamoto =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCOzNLXE9CSScbKEI=?=
Please understand that ISO 2022 is not a character set. It's a
*encoding* mechanize for multiple character set.

During the development of Mime, this was explained to the working group, by
those familiar with the topic of character set standardization.  Only a
small portion of the working group participants had much background on this
specialized topic, so the explainations were essential.

The fact that ISO 2022 is a switching specification, rather than a
character set specification, is the reason (or, at least, a major reason)
that it was not cited in the original Mime specification.  Instead, the
feeling was that use of ISO 2022 within Mime would be possible only when
SPECIFIC uses were described in additional documentation.  That is the
reason for the separate document describing ISO 2022-jp.

So, it is certainly true that most of us are very sloppy (or ignorant) in
our use of the nomenclature about technical aspects of character sets --
another good reason for making sure that this working group does not try to
solve such problems -- however, the written Mime work was conducted more
carefully and the distinctions that you described were covered quite
extensively at the time Mime was written.

On the other hand, it is probably good to remind us of the different terms
when we use them incorrectly.

d/

--------------------
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg Consulting                          Phone:  +1 408 246 8253
675 Spruce Dr.                                  Fax:    +1 408 249 6205
Sunnyvale, CA  94086               Email:  
dcrocker(_at_)mordor(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu



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