UTF-8 or US-ASCII in RFC 822bis?

[Pete Loshin <[e-mail]>]

OK. I've just been poring over some RFCs and I-Ds, and was wondering.
Here's what "Internet Message Format Standard"
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt-07.txt)
says about character sets:

2.1. General Description

At the most basic level, a message is a series of characters. A message 
that is conformant with this standard is comprised of characters with 
values in the range 1 through 127 and interpreted as US-ASCII characters 
[ASCII]. For brevity, this document sometimes refers to this range of 
characters as simply "US-ASCII characters".


And here's what RFC 2277, "IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages"
(BCP-18) says about character sets:

3.1.  What charset to use

   All protocols MUST identify, for all character data, which charset is
   in use.

   Protocols MUST be able to use the UTF-8 charset, which consists of
   the ISO 10646 coded character set combined with the UTF-8 character
   encoding scheme, as defined in [10646] Annex R (published in
   Amendment 2), for all text.


So, my question is, what's going on? Is 822bis going to support UTF-8,
as it is supposed to do (at least, according to the way I read RFC
2277)? Or is there some reason not to support UTF-8 that I don't know
about? Or am I missing something somewhere, and it really does support
UTF-8?

Any explanations or clarifications would be most welcome.

Thanks!
-pl

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Loshin         <[e-mail]>       +1 781/646-6318 |
|                                                             |
| _IPv6 Clearly Explained_ Morgan Kaufmann January 1999       |
| _TCP/IP Clearly Explained_ 3rd ed Morgan Kaufmann June 1999 |
|                                                             |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+