Re: Last Call: UTF-16, an encoding of ISO 10646 to Informational

From: Patrik Fältström (paf@swip.net)
Date: Sun Aug 15 1999 - 14:40:09 EDT


--On sön 15 aug 1999 12.31 +0000 Frank da Cruz <fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu>
wrote:

>> Just checking: you say that the registration of UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE as
>> the two registered names to be used in MIME is wrong?
>>
> If MIME is an interchange standard, then yes, it would be wrong. What is
> the point of codifying the internal storage format of different computer
> architectures in an interchange standard?

The idea of MIME is that the sender can tell the receiver what he has used.
Nothing else.

>> If someone of you which oppose this paper want a different introduction
>> which makes this point clearer, please submit text and I will be happy to
>> discuss this with Paul.
>>
> I would suggest that Section 3, including all its subsections, be replaced
> by a simple statement to the effect that UTF-16 shall always be
> transmitted most-significant byte first, and that the text label be
> simply "UTF-16".
>
> With this change, Section 4 is no longer needed and Section 5 can be
> simplified.

This means that there is _no_way_ for a sender that for some weird reason
want to send UTF-16 with least-significant byte first, not even in closed
environments. You are aware of that?

    paf



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT