Really, all I can say is this is one heck of a way to try to deal with
this issue.
For the record, there's a big difference between what Tom is proposing,
and what Randy Presun is referring to in the SYSAPPL MIB draft. SYSAPPL
constrains its strings to contain UTF-8 encoded ISO/IEC IS 10646-1
characters (one coded character set). Tom's suggestion explicitly
allows a wide range of character sets and encodings. (The existing
language -- although it may be "wrong" in many ways -- does constrain
the contents.)
I happen to like the SYSAPPL approach; Tom's makes my skin crawl. (But
that's no more than one tolerably-informed person's opinion in an
intensely debated topic.)
I go back to what I said in my previous message (seems like it was a
long time ago, doesn't it?), that I'd rather see this hashed out in a
different forum. But hey. Lloyd and Chris, if you really think we've
got "consensus" from this flurry of e-mail messages, and you think you
know what we've decided, good luck with it.
:: David Kellerman Northlake Software 503-228-3383
:: david_kellerman@nls.com Portland, Oregon fax 503-228-5662