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.

Keld: Please reread my message. This was a complete nonstarter at the time; the
10646 draft in 1991 had failed its ballot and there was no clear indication of
what it would turn into. Had we tried to move forward with a "just use 10646"
solution the IESG at the time would have flat-out rejected MIME. And they would
have been completely correct in doing so.

> Later on we did advocate
> 10646 UTF-8 as the building block for all new IETF protocols, eg in
> RFC 2130.

Yes, in April 1997. That's over five years later. And it was a VERY contentious
recommendaton at that point.

> 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.

Well, all I can say is that the consensus in the IETF went against you on
this.

				Ned