Keith Moore writes:
Within the Internet, the terminology used by ISO is largely
irrelevant. Using ISO terminology might aid those who are already
familiar with ISO protocols, but it will only confuse the majority of
readers of the MIME RFCs.
I think this is not in line with current IETF policy.
John Klensin should be able to claryfy the use of ISO terminology
in IETF work.
I'll also note that the MIME term "character set" is NOT the same
thing as the ISO term "coded character set".
What is the difference?
The RFC1345, where many MIME charsets are defined, follows ISO
terminology closely, and has the following definition of "charset":
The ISO definition of the term "coded character set" is as follows:
"A set of unambiguous rules that establishes a character set and the
one-to-one relationship between the characters of the set and their
coded representation." and this definition may be subject to
different interpretations. This memo does not put further
restrictions on the term of "coded character set" than the following:
"A coded character set is a set of rules that unambiguously and
completely determines which sequence of characters, if any, is
represented by each possible sequence of n-bit bytes for a certain
value of n." This implies that e.g. a coded character set extended
with one or more other coded character sets by means of the extension
techniques of ISO 2022 constitutes a coded character set in its own
right. In this memo the term "charset" is used to refer to the above
interpretation of the ISO term "coded character set".
Keld