ISO-8859-10; registration of new charset values; error in MIME draft

Olle Jarnefors (ojarnef@admin.kth.se)
Thu, 11 Apr 96 14:11:59 +0200 

/ This [coded character] set is suited for multiple-language
/ applications involving Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish,
/ German, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Sami (Lappish), Latvian,
/ Lithuanian, Norwegian, Faroese, and Swedish.

RFC 1521 _can_ be read as allowing the use of the "ISO-8859-10"
value, even without it being included into the IANA registry:

> 7.1.1.     The charset parameter

>    An initial list of predefined character set names can be found at the
>    end of this section.  Additional character sets may be registered

>    The defined charset values are:
>  
>    US-ASCII -- as defined in [US-ASCII].
>  
>         ISO-8859-X -- where "X" is to be replaced, as necessary, for the
>              parts of ISO-8859 [ISO-8859].  Note that the ISO 646
>              character sets have deliberately been omitted in favor of
>              their 8859 replacements, which are the designated character
>              sets for Internet mail.  As of the publication of this
>              document, the legitimate values for "X" are the digits 1
>              through 9.
 
>    No other character set name may be used in Internet mail without the
>    publication of a formal specification and its registration with IANA,

The statement about legitimate values for "X" at the time of the
publication of RFC 1521 is false. It was published in September
1993, when the ISO 8859-10 stadnard was 9 months old.
Unfortunately, this statement hasn't yet been changed in the
latest Internet Draft draft-ietf-822ext-mime-imt-04.txt. (I'm
sure this is due to oversight, not to ignorance.)

Let me also point out that four new parts of ISO 8859 are in the
ISO pipeline:

ISO 8859-11: Latin/Thai alphabet
ISO 8859-12: Latin/Devanagari alphabet
ISO 8859-13: Latin alphabet No. 7 (Baltic Rim)
ISO 8859-14: Latin alphabet No. 8 (Celtic)

It's possible that Latin/Devanagari and Latin (Celtic) will
appear interchanged in the final part numbering.

I would appreciate any clarification of these questions about
IETF character set registration.

-- 
Olle Jarnefors, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) <ojarnef@admin.kth.se>