Re: Suggested character set policy for the IETF

[Chris Newman <Chris.Newman@INNOSOFT.COM>]

On Thu, 26 Jun 1997, Mark Crispin wrote:
> I am, however, sympathetic to Martin's position.  I agree that "charset"
> should be the commonly used term, leading to wording such as:
> 	In this document, the term "character set" (commonly called a
> 	"charset") refers to the combination of coded character set and
> 	character encoding scheme.  Non-IETF specifications use the term
> 	"character set" to refer to the "coded character set", so the
> 	term "charset" is preferred for the IETF definition.
> (both CCS and CES should be defined earlier).


I tend to agree with Mark on this issue, although I don't believe this
definition is correct.

A charset in the MIME sense is a mapping from octets to characters and
related presentation information.  One way of constructing a MIME charset
is to combine a CCS with an invertible CES (note that a CCS and
non-invertible CES is *not* a MIME charset).  While CCS and CES are useful
concepts for people who build character sets; the MIME charset concept is
the useful concept when presenting plain text.