Re: [apps-discuss] [happiana] comments on draft-freed-media-type-regs

John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com> Sun, 05 February 2012 20:28 UTC

Date: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:28:37 -0500
From: John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
To: Ned Freed <ned.freed@mrochek.com>, Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@stpeter.im>
Message-ID: <B5EEE7F9167ED9C6CE1284BD@PST.JCK.COM>
In-Reply-To: <01OBLLE13ULY00ZUIL@mauve.mrochek.com>
References: <4EEBA03D.7000906@stpeter.im> <01OBLLE13ULY00ZUIL@mauve.mrochek.com>
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Cc: apps-discuss@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [apps-discuss] [happiana] comments on draft-freed-media-type-regs
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--On Saturday, February 04, 2012 16:42 -0800 Ned Freed
<ned.freed@mrochek.com> wrote:

>...
>> 5. Encodings
> 
>> When mentioning "7bit US-ASCII text", perhaps reference RFC
>> 5198.
> 
> Er, no. RFC 5198 doesn't even mention US-ASCII. And the
> Unicode format it defines is 8bit, not 7bit!

It mentions ASCII and, IIR, NVT ASCII.  As far as charsets are
concerned, the latter, along with RFC 20 ASCII, are a 7bit code
embedded in an 8bit field.  But they are mentioned largely in
the context of moving beyond them.   (Abbreviated version of a
long tirade: there is no such thing as "US-ASCII" and the term/
attempted distinction doesn't even have informal value unless
you think there are, e.g., Canadian-ASCII, Mexican-ASCII,
Brazilian-ASCII, etc.).

Anyone who is inclined to split hairs along the above lines
should note that, in the early days of the ARPANET, we had
machines floating around that embedded the 7bit ASCII code in
7bits, 9bits, and at least two different flavors of 8bits.

    john

Re: [apps-discuss] [happiana] comments on draft-f… Ned Freed
Re: [apps-discuss] [happiana] comments on draft-f… John C Klensin
Re: [apps-discuss] [happiana] comments on draft-f… Ned Freed