Re: UUCP, etc., and SMTP/822/MIME mail (was: Re: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-utf8headers-00.txt)

Ned,

Thanks for clarifying the dates in my deliberately-vague 
"decade".

We are, I think, in complete agreement: we couldn't have 
rationally done anything else than what we did, and the text you 
cite explains exactly why we made that decision.  I was only 
suggesting that, faced with similar decisions, but a new 
context, today, we are not, and should not be, obligated to 
replicate the decision of what is now thirteen or fourteen years 
ago.

    john


--On Thursday, 01 January, 2004 15:24 -0800 
[email protected] wrote:

>> > We _could_ have adopted a rigid, Unicode-only, rule a
>> > decade ago rather than doing charset-specific tagging in
>> > text content types and 2047 encodings.
>
>> IIRC, unicode wasn't known to be stable at that time.  it
>> certainly wasn't widely adopted, and it's hard to imagine
>> that we could have gotten consensus on such a rule.  it's
>> only after 10 years' experience with unicode that we have
>> some confidence in its character repertoire, and we have even
>> less experience with other aspects of it.
>
> A decade ago isn't a particularly relevant date in the
> development of MIME -- at that point in time MIME was already
> a draft standard, making such a change quite difficult to make.
>
> A much more relevant date is November 18-22, 1991. This is the
> date of the last IETF meeting prior to the approval of MIME as
> a proposed standard. Realistically, this was the last point in
> time at which a change as major as uncategorical endorsement
> of a single, universal charset  specification could have been
> made. The actual MIME specifications were subsequently
> submitted to the IESG for approval in January 1992.
>
> According to the Unicode web site the complete specification
> of Unicode 1.0 wasn't published until June, 1992. (Amusingly
> enough, that was the same month in which RFC 1341 appeared.)
> In November 1991 the universal charset situation was far from
> clear: What what then called 10646 seemed to be on the way out
> and Unicode seemed to be on the way in but no conclusions had
> been reached.
>
> This led to the following text appearing in RFC 1341:
>
>             NOTE:   Beyond  US-ASCII,  an  enormous
> proliferation   of             character  sets  is  possible.
> It is the opinion of the IETF             working group that a
> large number of character sets is NOT a             good
> thing.   We would prefer to specify a single character
> set that can be used universally for representing all of the
> world's   languages   in  electronic  mail.   Unfortunately,
> existing practice in several communities seems to  point  to
> the  continued  use  of  multiple character sets in the near
> future.  For this reason, we define names for a small number
> of  character  sets  for  which  a  strong  constituent base
> exists.    It is our hope  that  ISO  10646  or  some  other
> effort  will  eventually define a single world character set
> which can then be specified for use in Internet mail, but in
> the  advance of that definition we cannot specify the use of
> ISO  10646,  Unicode,  or  any  other  character  set  whose
> definition is, as of this writing, incomplete.
>
> Even with 20:20 hindsight I fail to see any other reasonable
> course of action we could have taken at the time.
>
> 				Ned