ietf-822
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Re: Calling for your input to IETF

1994-12-05 09:59:29
  My thanks to ICHIKAWA-san for clarifying (at least to me) at least one of
the underlying points that have been disturbing our Japanese colleagues
about the MIME discussion, although, as Valdis and David point out, it's
really an 822 issue.
  We have a history of recognizing that the Internet is pragmatic in its
approach to issues such as this, and it seems to me that the pragmatic
response to the concern over the character encoding to be inferred for a
non-MIME message (or a MIME message without the necessary header) must be
guided by what works, while recognizing that this may violate 822, which,
by the way I believe we must admit is US-centric, simply because the US
took the lead in this development and USASCII is what was there to be used
when 822 was written.
  We make allowances for other deviations from standards, and it seems to
me that we should be able to be flexible enough to recognize that practice
in certain parts of the world defaults for good reason to languages,
character-sets, and encodings which deviate from strict 822.  As I believe
we're all agreed, MIME helps respolve that dilema and therefore represents
progress.  Our differences are in the non-MIME situation, and I hope we can
acknowledge that we're incompatible in that situation and move on to become
compatible through MIME and whatever we can all develop together in the
future that wil be better than MIME.

Jim



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