RE: General policy

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald.t.alvestrand@delab.sintef.no>]

> So, has everybody on this list agreed that
>  
>         we should provide a single universal encoding of text usable
> 	by (almost) all existing protocols so that we do not have to
> 	extend all the protocols
Not so fast.....
I would regard the "right way" to recognize that the IETF is NOT the
world's greatest expert body on character sets, and behave accordingly.
We *are* (in my completely fair and unbiased opinion :-) the world's greatest
experts in making workable agreements for communication over computer
networks.

This means that:

- We should keep our minds open for, and expect to see within the next
  10 years, a single standard blessed by ISO that has all the properties
  that we desire, and should be adopted by us.

- We should do whatever we need to do to get things to work in the meantime.

I've got an idea that this requires our protocols to do character set
*labelling*, and that character set *switching* may not be required,
since there should be only approximately 4 things to label:

- US-ASCII
- ISO 8859-1 (and other temporary, traditional means like 2022-jp)
- Our 10-year hack
- The "Final Solution".

There is a great deal of verbiage to be added in the design goals for
the 10-year hack. Forgive me if I try to make it clearer.

>  
> Assuming so, has everybody agreed that the encoding should
>  
> 	be for plain text processing
If you mean "be able to represent plain text, but we should ignore the
issues of underlining, emphasis, font size and so on", I agree.
>  
> 	be ASCII compatible
If you mean "be able to represent US-ASCII as a proper subset", I agree.
I'm not sure that the requirement to let US-ASCII text be legal text in
the encoding is a necessary requirement.
>  
> 	be universal
If you mean "be able to encode all known and tabulated writing systems,
and be extensible to cover new ones as they are tabulated", yes.
>  
> 	satisfy causality
Causality = no 2 glyphs are represented by the same octet string sequence.
(The non-unification requirement) (watch out for meaning of the word "glyph)
>  
> 	have finitestateness
Finitestateness - all glyph sequences generatable by the encoding can
be enumerated. Note the possible conflict with "universal". Yes.
>  
> 	is finitely resynchronizable
Yes.
>  
> Any opinion?
Yes. :-)

               Harald Tveit Alvestrand