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

On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 03:24:59PM -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.

Well, we could have built MIME on ISO 10646, and indeed the character
set support in MIME was built on 10646 as the reference character set,
as is also indicated by RFC 1345, which is the MIME related RFC that
made the ground for the charset definition. Later on we did advocate
10646 UTF-8 as the building block for all new IETF protocols, eg in
RFC 2130.

I know that the UTF-8 RFC now references Unicode as the normative
specification, but I think that was a mistake from IETF.
We should refer to international standards where they exist, and not to
specifications which are merely industry standards.

Best regards
keld