Unicode/MIME Internet drafts posted

[David_Goldsmith@taligent.com (David Goldsmith)]

New versions of documents I previously posted to the ietf-822 and unicored
mailing lists are now available as Internet Drafts (they should be at your
local RFC repository now or shortly). The ASCII versions should be
available first, with Postscript versions to follow. The documents are:

draft-goldsmith-mime-unicode-00.txt (or .ps)
draft-goldsmith-mime-utf7-00.txt (or .ps)

Respectively, they specify the general use of Unicode as a MIME charset,
and a specific new transformation format of Unicode that is designed for
use with Internet mail and news.

On the good advice of many people involved with the IETF, I've changed the
documents to specify Unicode 1.1 instead of ISO/IEC-10646. This is partly
due to the greater level of specificity in Unicode 1.1 as to character
properties and handling of combining forms. Also, since ISO 10646 is an
international standard, several people felt that the IETF would want to
take a more deliberate and careful approach to standardizing its usage on
the Internet.

These new proposals were made primarily to get a reasonable charset defined
quickly so that the Internet community can start to gain experience with
Unicode (and 10646), which is the usual Internet approach to assimilating
new technology. To that end, these proposals should be viewed as
experimental, and they are intended to be submitted as Experimental RFCs.

This experience will help determine the right course for the 10646 effort.
At some point in the future, a set of 10646 charset names should be defined
for use with MIME; they may or may not refer to the same encoding as these
documents.

Thanks, everyone, for your help and suggestions so far.

----------------------------
David Goldsmith
david_goldsmith@taligent.com
Taligent, Inc.
10201 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA  95014-2233