Re: Registration of new charset

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

On Fri, 13 Feb 1998, David Goldsmith wrote:
> Charset name(s): UTF-7
> 
> Published specification(s): RFC 2152
> 
> I'd like to request that this registration go forward, now that the IANA 
> charset registration procedure has been accepted by the IETF.

UTF-7 violates section 3.4 of the registration procedures because it
is a character encoding scheme which includes a content-transfer-encoding.
Base64 is clearly better thought of as a content-transfer-encoding.
Because of this layering violation, UTF-7 can not take advantage of the
8BITMIME infrastructure which is widely deployed in email.

In addition, UTF-7 is not significantly different from UTF-8 when used as
a MIME charset.  UTF-8 is currently the preferred international charset by
IETF policy and charsets with duplicate functionality are not desirable.

Since UTF-7 is being deployed in products, I conclude that it should be
labelled LIMITED USE per section 3.5 of the registration procedures.

		- Chris