Re: Proposal to register SCSU for IANA

[Markus Scherer <markus.scherer@jtcsv.com>]

Thanks for the initial responses -

My understanding was that this IANA charsets registry is de facto the only such registry for any charsets, and that it registers more than what is appropriate for use in MIME.

I agree that the properties of SCSU make it unsuitable for MIME, at least without an additional transfer encoding à la quoted-printable or base64, which would make it clumsy. UTF-8 is probably better for that.

However, I think it is worth registering, and a comment saying that it is not suitable for MIME text would be fine.

I am not sure where SCSU is actually used - I assume that Reuters uses it (or a variant of it) for its news service, since it seems to come from that corner. It provides a more compact encoding than UTF-8 or UTF-16 which each expand the size of text for some languages. We have an implementation in our ICU library (http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/cvs/icu/source/common/unicode/scsu.h). Of course, its statefulness makes it unsuitable for internal processing.


markus