Re: Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-goldsmith-utf7-01.txt

["Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>]

On Thu, 6 Feb 1997, Dan Oscarsson wrote:

> 
> > If there are no objections I will try to advance this to RFC 
> > (Experimental) status in two weeks, then register "UTF-7".
> > 
> 
> The drafts says:
>    UTF-7 should normally be used only in the context of 7 bit
>    transports, such as mail and news. In other contexts, straight
>    Unicode or UTF-8 is preferred.
> 
> 
> UTF-7 would work very nice with 8-bit transports, for example when sending
> e-mail and using charset=iso-8859-1; content-transfer-encoding=8bit
> allowing all 8-bits to be used giving an easy to read text of the
> 8bit character set and still allowing all UCS-2 characters to be used.
> 
> Most 8-bit character sets should be able to use it allowing them to
> still be readable and compact without removing the possiblity to include
> all UCS-2 characters. Is like if we had an UTF-8 that did not destroy
> the 8-bit character set in use.

This may sound like a good idea, but probably isn't. The main problem
is that you would need "charset" tags of the form iso-8859-1-utf-7
and so on. We already have way too much different character encodings,
so let's not create more without really strong needs.

Regards,	Martin.