Re: Suggested character set policy for the IETF

[Walter Ian Kaye <walter@natural-innovations.com>]

At 12:28p +0200 06/26/97, Martin J. Duerst wrote:
 > On Mon, 23 Jun 1997 Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no wrote:
 > >     With the international Internet follows an absolute requirement to
 > >     interchange data in a multiplicity of languages, which in turn
 > >     utilize a bewildering number of characters or other character-like
 > >     representation mechanisms.
 >
 > What do you mean by "other character-like representation mechanisms"?

I'm guessing he's thinking of Japanese "kana" syllabaries...


 > It is very clear that the parameter name "charset" should not
 > be changed at all. But there is absolutely no justification for
 > keeping a misleading term such as "character set"; there is no
 > requirement for terminology to be backwards compatible with
 > a particular IETF prototol, and there are other IETF documents
 > (e.g. HTML i18n, MHML) that use much more understandable and
 > less misleading terminology. Just using "Charset" instead of
 > "character set" would already be a great improvement.

But aren't people going to look at "charset" and mentally expand it to
"character set"? I mean, in a context other than the MIME parameter?

__________________________________________________________________________
  Walter Ian Kaye <boo_at_best*com>    Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter