Re: Suggested character set policy for the IETF

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

On Tue, 15 Jul 1997, Keld J|rn Simonsen wrote:

> "Martin J. Duerst" writes:
> 
> > On Tue, 1 Jul 1997, Ned Freed wrote:
> > 
> > > > I thought it was obvious: We currently say that a charset is
> > > > a mapping from a series of octets to a sequence of graphic
> > > > characters. UTF-8 produces a lot more than graphic characters.
> 
> The key word here is "graphics". All the registrations I did had
> control characters in them, if not you could not figure out
> what characters were in the stream. The work "graphic" should surely
> be removed or expanded to also allow control characters for MIME.

Keld - I'm not sure whether I understand you correctly. A lot of
"charset"s contain control characters, such as ESC, but in MIME
terms ESC is actually a control octet, and not a character.
For example, the ESC in iso-2022-jp is such a control octet,
but it is used to switch between coded character sets. It appears
in the "series of octets", but not in the "sequence of graphic
characters".

Or is it something else that you had in mind?

Regards,	Martin.