Re: Registration of new charset "UTF-16"

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 12:08 98/05/14 -0700, Chris Newman wrote:

> 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.

Chris - This is correct as an official view. But it does not help
the average person who consults the charset registry. We have to
make the registry really useful. There are a lot of things that
could be improved, and what Erik has proposed is definitely one.
Any help is apreciated.


> 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.

Why not? One problem is to find a good name for it, and you just gave
one above, there may be others. For the rest, it's pretty easy. Put
together stuff from HTTP1.1 and from the MIME RFCs. Make it so that
widetext/* in the HTTP MIME derivative is equivalent to text/*. The
sooner we do it, the sooner we get rid of the problems with interchange
between HTTP-delivered content and other protocols, and the sooner we
can have full internationalization in email. Email UA implementors
won't have much work on this one, but they have to know what to do.


Regards,   Martin.