RE: Registration of new charset "UTF-16"

[Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>]

> 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?
> 
> Or are you referring to other email-like protocols, like NNTP 
> perhaps? Or ACAP? Or IMAP? POP?

The MIME standard applies to all protocols that claim to be compliant
with the MIME standard. (This is a tautology, isn't it?).

Frankly, I think we could do with a new top-level type that wasn't
"text" but was like text, without the restrictions that would disallow
UTF-16.

On the other hand, most XML (and some HTML) would more reasonably be
characterized as 'application' rather than 'text' anyway. 
 
> I'm just trying to come up with a non-confusing wording for that 
> sentence in the UTF-16
> registration. Your help is appreciated. What wording would you suggest?

Here's an attempt:

# In accordance with the rules on end-of-line convention and 'text/',
# UTF-16 is inappropriate for use with 'text' media types. Those media types
# which might be deployed with UTF-16 might consider registering an
# 'application' type as well.