Subject: Re: iCalendar - "octets" question

From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 09:43:22 -0500

>If you don't know the data format, don't muck with the data.
>Most, but NOT all charsets are based on US-ASCII.

RFC-2445, section 2.3, "International Considerations": "Use of non-US-ASCII-compatible character sets is NOT recommended."

That's not quite the same as "not supported", but I'd say that, as poor as 
2445's i18n is, it would be foolish to expect a recipient to handle a 
non-US-ASCII-compatible character set.

Now, if we revise 2445 to deal better with character sets, maybe we could 
expect to enable the use of non-US-ASCII-compatible character sets.  It'll 
be a lot of work, though.  Might even be impossible; how many 
non-ASCII-based character sets are there that contain the Roman alphabet? 
(Aside from EBCDIC; but banning EBCDIC does not disenfranchize based on 
nationality.  :-)

Still...I could see a middle ground on this particular question: senders 
SHOULD NOT split multibyte characters; recipients SHOULD accept split 
characters.

/=======================================================\
|John Stracke                   |Principal Engineer     |
[email-masked]  |Incentive Systems, Inc.|
|http://www.incentivesystems.com|My opinions are my own.|
|=======================================================|
|Two words that do not go together: "Memorial Cookbook".|
\=======================================================/

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From: Doug Royer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 13:16:01 -0700

> RFC-2445, section 2.3, "International Considerations": "Use of non-US-ASCII-compatible character sets is NOT recommended."

But not dis-allowed. 

> non-US-ASCII-compatible character set.

No - if you can charset convert - it works.

> (Aside from EBCDIC; but banning EBCDIC does not disenfranchize based on

Irrelevant - break 'between' characters as RFC2445 says - and
it will work in any charset.

> SHOULD NOT split multibyte characters; recipients SHOULD accept split

If you don't know the charset, you can't always tell how to put it
back together.

I see no change needed to 2445, it says split between characters.
Perhaps some additional text to explain that does not mean
splitting in the middle of characters.