RE: General policy

[Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp>]

> > 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.

Are you serious?

Aren't you saying that we shouldn't have developped TCP/IP and should
have waited for ISO develop the single network protocol, which should
be adopted by the Internet?

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

I think the Internet need the single encoding, immediately.

> 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".

Label? Are you proposing to modify all the existing protocols
to be able to handle the label?

> 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.

I think the Internet is ready to design "The Final Solution", while
ISO is not.

I also think the Internet seriously needs the solution, now.

And, then, it is the role of IETF to provide the solution without
waiting ISO standard.

> > 	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.

If you want to use the existing 8-bit transparent protocols without change,
or, if you don't want to support two text file types, the latter is
the necessary requirement.

For the rest of your comment, please read my previous mail on the
summary of the ucs-bof, before commenting.

						Masataka Ohta