RE: General policy

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

Harald Tveit Alvestrand writes:

> > 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.

I know that the European Standards Organisation CEN is also working on
the problem, but anyway IETF has never just sticked to de jure
standards :-)

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

Agree.

I agree to the list of properties listed, and then I would like to point
to RFC 1345, which has been designed for common internet use and backwards
compatibility with existing internet specifications. It is thus a
candidate for Haralds "10 years hack".

This is the socalled mnemonic specification - the general outline is:

    all characters have a short identifier, which is represented
    in a subset of ASCII. The short identifier has sometimes a
    mnemonic, rememberable name; sometimes it is not very rememberable.

    with the use of an intro sequence, signalling that here comes
    out of band data, all characters defined can be represented in 
    ASCII, and many of them in a readable way.

    Each character is represented uniquely.
   
    Syncronization can be done within a limited number of bytes.

    The repertoire covers ISO 10646 and also the Han characters
    with differentiation between cjk characters.

Keld