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

[Dan Oscarsson <Dan.Oscarsson@trab.se>]

> > 
> > 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.
> 

Actually UTF-7 for me is much more a content-encoding than
a character set. And could be used for other character sets than UCS.

But even if is is restricted to UCS is would work fine to use:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-7
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit


and only encode characters that can not be represented by 8 bits.

    Dan
    
--
Dan Oscarsson
Telia Engineering AB                       Email: Dan.Oscarsson@trab.se
Box 85
201 20  Malmo, Sweden