> From SISAACSON at novell.com Wed May 21 09:35:27 1997
>>>> >>> Robert Herriot <Robert.Herriot at Eng.Sun.COM> 05/20 1:37 PM >>>
>> > Did we agree to one or two bytes for the length of attribute names? I
> > thought two, just in case we ever use Unicode rather than UTF-8 to
> > encode attribute names. We wouldn't want the attributes to then be
> > limited to 127 characters.
>> I thought all lengths would be 2 or 4 bytes, never just 1. I thought we
> limited attribute names to be the same as keywords now: US ASCII characters
>> (a-zA-Z), digits (0-9), hyphen (-) and underscore (_). We all know the
> consequences of not being able to internationalize these attribute names,
> but why are you suggesting maybe someday worrying about UTF-8 for attribute
> names?
I'm not suggesting we support them in version one, but I am suggesting
that the protocol should not make them impossible for a future time
when a foreign site might want to add an attribute for a Printer
(i.e. print server) which uses a localized-name. Admittedly, we haven't
dealt with the issue of how a client converts an attribute-name to a
localized phrase. If we had a solution for that then we might
see no need for attribute names that are not ASCII.