---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 1997 21:24:48 -0400
From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
To: Chris Wellens <chrisw@iwl.com>
Cc: Harald Alvestrand <Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no>,
Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>, rpresuhn@peer.com,
Lloyd Young <lpyoung@lexmark.com>
Subject: Re: Clarification on earlier mail
Harald's on holiday, so may not see your message for awhile.
Here's my take on this:
1. All protocols that use text should label which charset they're
using. Even if there's no immediate replacement for UTF-8, it will
not last forever, and we don't want the next transition (from UTF-8 to
whatever) to be as bad as the current transition (from ASCII to other
charsets) for many internet protocols.
2. New protocols should use some form of ISO 10646 for text, probably
UTF-8. UTF-8 discriminates against East Asian countries because it
uses very long codes for codepoints associated with ideographs, but
it's much more compatible with ASCII, and not limited to the BMP.
3. Use of non-universal charsets (like ISO-8859-*) with new protocols
should perhaps be possible (since we want to have labelling at any
rate), but should not be encouraged, unless there are significant
backward compatibility issues with using UTF-8.
Keith
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