Re: Metaquestion on this group

[Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp>]

> We
> generally don't create IETF WGs to study problems, we create
> them with charters that contain specific objectives.

I'd like to say that any objective containing such words as "universal" or
"character" is not specific enough.

> For example,
> since IESG tries to avoid being party to situations in which an
> idea that has been rejected by other standards bodies is carried
> around in the hope that *someone* will endorse it, a proposal
> that had that appearance would receive additional scrutiny.

I agree. While ISO's recent post mortem attempt on "character & glyph
model" to adjust terminologies will only make ISO standards self consistent
(of course, the result is, as usual, expected to contain a lot of weasel
wording and be virtually consistent with any model, some of which are mutually
inconsistent) and won't solve any real-world problems, that is, it won't
affect what we want to do, it is foolish to be evolved in useless debates
of ISO.

So, based on the fact that MIME charset is primarily for text/plain, with
which we have collected some experience, shouldn't we have a specific
objective of internationalized "encoding of plain text".

						Masataka Ohta