Kinoshita-san,
At 11:36 PM 12/7/94, Satoshi Kinoshita wrote:
But, labeling scheme of MIME is not the only
way for interoperability of multi-lingual messaging.
I guess iso-2022-int-* can be acceptable as another way for I14Y,
if it does not violate rfc822.
Most technical problems have many different solutions. The world of the
IETF and Internet standards is about convergence on single solutions. The
key to any successful standard is that it is... standard. As soon as one
must support multiple solutions, things get expensive, complicated, and
often unworkable.
Interoperability requires that a receiver support the conventions followed
by the sender. In the Internet, the goal is to allow the receiver to
support the sender's conventions without having first to coordinate with
the sender. This means that the receiver must be able to know what range
of things the sender might use.
We cannot expect all receivers to support all character sets, but we CAN
expect them to support a mechanism which lets them know what character set
is being used. That is one of the functions of Mime. The fact that that
function can be accomplished through other means is fine, but it is not the
way chosen as an Internet standard. Hence, participants on the global
Internet cannot be expected to have software which expects a non-Mime body
to use ISO-2022 encodings.
d/
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Dave Crocker
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