The Internet Mail Consortium describes itself (at http://www.imc.org)
as an industry consortium "focused on cooperatively managing and
promoting the rapidly-expanding world of electronic mail on the
Internet." Members are listed at http://www.imc.org/member-list.html
and include AOL, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Qualcomm,
and Sun Microsystems.
IMC has released a report (http://www.imc.org/mail-i18n.html)
called "Using International Characters in Internet Mail"; the
current version is 1 August 1998 and is labeled IMCR-010.
(Like RFCs, IMCRs are replaced by other IMCRs, but a given number
identifies a given version forever.)
Most of the i18n information here is IMHO very useful and timely.
Unfortunately, it is a "Recommendation" of the report that
multi-language mail bodies encoded in UTF-8 be tagged with
Plane 14 characters. UTR#7 is cited on all fours with the
HTML 4.0, ISO 639, ISO 2022, ISO 3166, ISO/IEC 8859, ISO/IEC 10646,
and MIME and SMTP RFC standards.
This is a Bad Thing. Plane 14 is not part of the Unicode Standard
yet, still less part of 10646, and was invented for specific
purposes, not for general-purpose labeling of plain text email.
(How must I tag my signature? LANGUAGE TAG, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER X TAG,
HYPHEN-MINUS TAG, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F TAG, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER W TAG?
Loyal daughters and sons of Sarasvati may wish to write
to mailto:reports@imc.org in protest, or (if attached to
member companies) to protest through their IMC liaison.
-- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:43 EDT