Re: A proposal

[Keld J|rn Simonsen <keld@xxxxxxxx>]

Well, seems like I spotted Eriks flame button.

The support for other character sets than 8859-1 is a real concern from me.
I am actually working together with Greek people on this subject,
they are quite active.
My representation of RARE resolutions are correct.
I do not think IETF should ignore RARE positions.

Yes, Erik, as said before, I would favour a 10646 solution.
But I would favour a solution with no subsets, and it should be said
right from the beginning that this is 10646 that we are running,
not 8859-1. Timing problems with the availability of the IS have been
discussed before.

> Great!  I'd love to have a full and sufficient service for all the
> customers everywhere, but we CAN'T DO THAT IN ONE JUMP.  There are more
> pressing concerns than Cyrillic mail at the moment.  I mean, despite
> your frantic concern for the rest of the world, for which they are
> probably going to be eternally grateful, you must see that if you stall
> this, we won't have "user requirements" satisfied for years to come.  I

Well, I have solutions that fulfill these requirements right now.
Actually I have had this running for over a year here. And people are
beginning to run this software all around Europe. So why settle with
some insufficient solution when there are already better designs around?

> assume that "user requirements" are your concern, not something else.
> A conspiracy theory where you were to introduce intractable problems to
> the Internet world on behalf of the X.400 world fits the data points,
> almost as well.

C'mon, Erik, you know I am an old EUnetter (being the Danish Eunet 
backbone manager for over 8 years) and not a spy for the OSI
world. RARE is working on IP too these days. My own implementation of
my proposal is done in sendmail 5.61 and 5.64.

Erik is hinting to my other involvement. Yes, I am involved to over my
ears in other i18n activities. And the work presented here is very
related to my other i18n work. This includes ISO SC22 POSIX i18n, ISO C,
ISO SC22 ad hoc character group, ISO SC22 i18n WG (WG20), ISO SC2 10646
WG, ISO SC22 WG11 lang. indep. stuff, European EWOS CAE and character
set issues, CEN CSC character group, Nordic INSTA character set group,
EurOpen and UniForum i18n groups, Nordunet NETF on DSAs, RARE ad hoc WG
on character sets plus some liason to OSI work and UNIX document
handling work. I do not see it as putting the discussions of other foras
on this TF, but applying my knowledge to this important area too. 
And I think it already has paid off, having a running implementation for
over a year handling multi character set mail in a general and convenient
way.

Keld