Small comment to UTF-7 draft

[David_Goldsmith@taligent.com (David Goldsmith)]

Below is a private mail message I received recently. I've received the
author's permission to redirect it to these two mailing lists for
discussion. I do not currently have a position on this issue and I wanted
to hear from the community.

>Date: Tue, 10 May 94 11:19:37 +0200
>From: Dan Oscarsson <Dan.Oscarsson@malmo.trab.se>
>To: david_goldsmith@taligent.com
>Subject: Small comment to UTF-7 draft
>X-Sun-Charset: US-ASCII
>
>Hi
>
>I just read the utf7-03 draft for UTF-7 and saw one thing I would like to
>comment on.
>
>In the summary you recommend UTF-7 only to be used with 7 bit transports, but
>I would very much recommend to use UTF-7 with 8 bit transports if the text
>is a mainly latin character based text. Then all ISO 8859-1 characters can
>be sent as themselves (as ISO 8859-1 is a true subset of UCS-2) and only
>those character outside ISO 8859-1 to be encoded. This is much better than
>using
>UTF-8 which is NOT ISO 8859-1 compatible and will for all users that use
>ISO 8859-1 as their standard (and ISO 8859-1 is the defacto standard today)
>look like garbage. UTF-7 on a 8 bit transport with ISO 8859-1 as character
>coding will works just like quoted-printable, but will make most characters
>in ISO 8859-1 readable even for users without a viewer that understands
>the UTF-7 encoding.
>
>I suggest strongly that UTF-7 should recommend it to be used with 8 bit
>transports for all texts with mainly latin script.
>
>Regards,
>
>    Dan
>
>--
>Dan Oscarsson
>Telia Research AB                       Email: Dan.Oscarsson@malmo.trab.se
>Box 85
>201 20  Malmo, Sweden
>

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