Re: New UTF-7 draft

> For 10646, one
> opens up, as Ohta-san has pointed out, all of the problems of
> dealing with an extensible standard/family of standards and the
> special one of dealing with one of those when the extension
> model is not yet established (we at least know the extensibility
> parameters for 2022).

I might have made you misunderstand the issue. First of all,
it has nothing to do with C/J/K unification.

One of my point in my ID on 10646 is that ISO 10646 (AND UNICODE)
can be and actually is subsetted.

According to Keith, that 2022 is extensible does not mean full 2022
can be MIME charset because new unknown sets may be added. If so,
subsetting of UNICODE without profiling information is equally
harmful because some set may be and is made unknown by some
implementation.

That is, if Japanized windows/NT receives unprofiled-Unicode text, it
may or may not be able to display it, because its font covers only
about a half of the entire 20,000 Han characters.

> Ohta-san, David is proposing an experiment right now, not a
> standards-track document.  Experiments are much more the IETF
> way of doing things than arguments from logic and theory.

Experiment is OK.

But, for the meaningful experiment, we need some information on the
experiment.

For example, as you pointed out, we need information on whether-or-not
and how bidirectionality is handled.

As I pointed out, we need information on which subset of Han characters
are supported.

> >From the standpoint of [my understanding of] your position, the
> best thing to do would be to focus on getting his proposals to
> be as clear and precise as possible so that the results can be
> objectively analyzed.

My point is that his proposal is unclear and imprecise with regards
to our current understanding on MIME charset.

Does his charset handle Araic? I don't think so.

Does his charset handle Japanese? I don't think so.

If he says "I'll handle Latin-1 characters only with UNICODE" and
reports "My experiment has been successful", it's meaning is quite
clear. But, as the success is too much obvious from the beginning,
it does not worth experimenting, I think.

If he says "I'll handle UNICODE in general" and reports "MY experiment
has been successful", what does it mean?

						Masataka Ohta

--Boundary (ID uEbHHWxWEwCKT9wM3evJ5w)

Received on Sunday, 27 March 1994 09:24:35 UTC