Re: UTF-8 revision

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

On Sun, 7 Sep 1997 Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no wrote:
> Thought for list: One alternative to registering UNICODE-1-1-UTF-8 is
> to standardize the "charset-edition" of RFC 1922 section 4.1.
> Comments on this alternative?

Registering UNICODE-1-1-UTF-8 is much better as it doesn't cause
compatibility problems with MIME readers.  The long ugly name is also good 
since we *really* want to discourage its use.

I don't like "charset-edition" as defined in RFC 1922.  In order for it to
function interoperably with changing character sets, it would require a
reset of MIME to proposed standard so that all MIME MUAs could be required
to support it.  I think that's a horrible idea. 

Now a "charset-subset" parameter would be quite useful down the road as
characters are added.  Clients have the problem that the installed fonts
may not have all the characters in the latest 10646/Unicode.  A
"charset-subset" advisory parameter (e.g., "amend5" subset only uses the
subset of 10646 range defined in 10646 + amendments 1-5) could be useful.
But it wouldn't be necessary for interoperability.