RE: Thoughts about characters transmission

[keld@dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen)]

Andr'e PIRARD writes:

> The _most_important_point_ is that a single common representation code
> be defined _for_the_line_ (suiting the purpose, namely to cover all national
> languages in one single way) and that people be instructed that every bit
> of text should travel in that code on the wire, whatever_the_protocol_is.

I agree to most of what Andre'' is saying and I have an additional
point here: that the single common representation code should be something
that can be handled by existing software and hardware, because it
will take a long time before the conversion software is installed
on all machines, or even a large share of the installed base.
Also I would like to emphasis the need for world-wide solutions.
This would mean that ISO 8859-1 would not be a good candidate,
we need something ASCII based (or even with a smaller repertoire
than ASCII to cover the problems with EBCDIC and national ISO 646 
variants).

I have proposed such a solution in RFC1345.

Keld