- From: Chris Newman <Chris.Newman@INNOSOFT.COM>
- Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 12:08:32 -0700 (PDT)
- To: Erik van der Poel <erik@netscape.com>
- Cc: MURATA Makoto <murata@apsdc.ksp.fujixerox.co.jp>, ietf-charsets@ISI.EDU, murata@fxis.fujixerox.co.jp, Tatsuo_Kobayashi@justsystem.co.jp
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
--Boundary (ID uEbHHWxWEwCKT9wM3evJ5w)
Received on Thursday, 14 May 1998 12:10:21 UTC