Re: charset=utf8 and Mac mailers

From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Tue Nov 04 2003 - 23:44:47 EST

  • Next message: Abdij Bhat: "UTF8 and COntrol Characters"

    Markus Scherer wrote:
    > YTang0648@aol.com wrote:
    >
    >> We are talking about charset value for the internet protocol here. It
    >> is a special narrow field of charset name. The value used by Internet
    >> protocol are defined by a well defined process-
    >> http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2278.html RFC 2278 - IANA Charset
    >> Registration Procedures
    >
    > "well defined process" is a stretch. By the way, RFC 2978 replaced 2278
    > a few years ago.

       I think exactly the same way as Markus on all his points. It's
    regrettable but true that all sort of garbages (in addition to
    well-defined useful character encodings) were thrown into it and were
    accepted almost blindly. In other words, there's a serious quality
    control issue.

    > The problem with the IANA charset _list_ is that it lists not only
    > useful charset names but also
    > - names that are illegal for charsets by its own rules
    > - names for things that are not (verifiably) charsets at all

        Markus may have something different in mind, but I'd add to this
    category coded character set names like ks_c_5601-1987 that are not
    suitable for use as MIME charset.

    > - names for charsets that cannot be implemented reliably
    > because there is no online, machine-readable specification for them,
    > and even for the ones where there is one, it is not usually
    > a mapping to/from Unicode

       Related to the last point is that some charsets are not properly
    annotated.

       Jungshik



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