Re: Registration of new charset "UTF-16"

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

On Thu, 14 May 1998, Erik van der Poel wrote:
> > It is a violation of the MIME
> > standard to use UTF-16 in a text media type, and that rule is not specific
> > to email.
> 
> Are you saying that the MIME standard somehow attempts to specify what is or is not
> allowed in other protocols, like HTTP, HTML, XML, etc?
> 
> ...
    
The MIME standard specifies what is allowed in all protocols which use
MIME.  Some protocols may adopt a profile of MIME rather than "100% pure
MIME" ;-), but that does not alter what the MIME standard says.
 
The MIME standard places specific requirements on text/* media types -- in
particular that a newline is represented with the octet pair "0x0d 0x0a"   
and that those octet values do not occur separately.  Also that no NUL
octets appear.
 
So if you use UTF-16 with a text/* media type, then you're not using MIME.
 
We might eventually define a MIME "widetext" top-level media type for
plaintext data using UTF-16 or UCS-4, but I don't think it's time to do
that yet.  UTF-8 is standards track and may be freely used in text/* media
types.
 
                - Chris