Subject: Re: iCalendar - "octets" question

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 14:52:42 -0500

Shannon asked:
>A developer just asked me "What is an octet?"
>[Snip]
>In general my developer (and I) expected to read "75 characters" - but
>instead read "75 octets" - does this related to multi-byte encoding?

Octet is used in tons of RFCs w/o actually defining it (go ahead and do a 
FT search like I did).  Its actually defined WAAAAAAAAAAY back in RFC 760 
/ STD 5 (Internet Protocol), top of Page 43:

octet
          An eight bit byte.

However, w/o actually doing lots of digging you could also use your Latin 
to the question too since Octet is defined as "a group of 8".

Instead of saying "75 characters" that would imply that it could in fact 
be >200 8-bit bytes long in some Multi-byte character sets or using "75 
bytes" which can vary in size based on the platform in use (8-bit byte, 
16-bit bytes, etc), we wanted to indicate "75 8-bit bytes" so that any 
implementation conforms properly.

Bruce
===========================================================================
Bruce Kahn                                INet: [email-masked]
Iris Associates                          Phone: 978.392.5335
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---

From: "Shannon J. Clark" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 14:19:41 -0600

Bruce,

Thanks - I suspect I am not the only person to wonder about this - I did
guess that it had something to do with 8 - but its exact meaning and
implications for multi-bytes was unclear.

Does this mean that in a multi-byte object you SHOULD wrap potentially in
the middle of character? Does this have any potential problems? Or would it
be recommended that the wrapping happen only at the ends of a character -
i.e. at 73 or 74 octets if 75 might cause a break of a character?

Should any of this be further detailed? As we look at internationalization
this strikes me as one area to look at - clearly it was considered in the
writing - just want to make sure we don't have any unintended consequences.

Shannon
  -----Original Message-----
  From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
  Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 1:53 PM
  To: Shannon J. Clark
  Cc: [email-masked]
  Subject: Re: iCalendar - "octets" question

  Octet is used in tons of RFCs w/o actually defining it (go ahead and do a
FT search like I did).  Its actually defined WAAAAAAAAAAY back in RFC 760 /
STD 5 (Internet Protocol), top of Page 43:

  octet
           An eight bit byte.

  Bruce