On Sun, Aug 15, 1999 at 08:00:47AM -0700, Frank da Cruz wrote:
> Eric Brunner <brunner@maine.rr.com> wrote:
>
> That note was dashed off in haste. The idea I was trying to get across is
> that, when a particular writing system may be represented by more than one
> character set, and one of them is an international standard, and the others
> are not, there is no reason or justification for the IETF to recognize the
> nonstandard ones, nor does it serve any useful purpose. For example, if
> Latin-2 is registered for use on the Internet, there is no reason to also
> register PC Code Page 852 and/or 1250.
I agree in the ideas behind what is said here, but when we originally
did the MIME specifications, and I wrote RFC 1345, we agreed that
there would be use of registering with IANA also vendor charsets, as
they would be used in the local agents for internet applications, such
as mail, news and web. We agreed that the vendor charsets should not
be used on the wire, and the MIME RFCs reflect this, as only a very
limited set of ISO character sets were to be initially recognised
with protocols using MIME charset capabilities.
I have a problem with UTF-16 being a MIME charset, as I do not believe
it qualifies, UTF-16 covers over at least 2 encodings:
1. big-endian encoding
2. little-endian encoding.
To make UTF-16 a MIME charset you need to qualify which encoding
form (big/litte endian) that you are using.
Keld Simonsen
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