Re: Suggested character set policy for the IETF

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

On Thu, 26 Jun 1997, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:

> 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...

Interesting idea. But not realy appropriate. Both syllabic and
ideographic characters are called characters, both in everyday
usage and in standards terminology. They are usually not called
letters, but that's a different issue.


>  > 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?

If that's a support for my position to get away from the term
"character set" (for what it's used in MIME) altogether, then
I gladly accept it :-). Every step away from this is progress.

Regards,	Martin.