Re: UTF-8 revision

[Ned Freed <Ned.Freed@INNOSOFT.COM>]

> Here is the updated draft on UTF-8.  The major change is in 6. Security
> Considerations (thanks to John Gardiner Myers for the wise suggestion) with
> a referencing note in 2. UTF-8 Definition.  I'll send an I-D, modified if
> necessary, after coming back from a trip next week.

Overall this looks pretty good. I have only a couple of comments on it:

(1) The discussion of the Hangul mess and versioning is far too
    wishy-washy. What needs to be said is that the charset label "UTF-8" is
    aligned with the character assignments in Unicode 2.0 or later and that
    it is NOT aligned with the assignments in Unicode 1.0 or 1.1, in
    particular the old Hangul range.

    Nowhere does the current document actually say this in so many words,
    although it can be inferred in section 5. It needs to come out and say it,
    as otherwise it is likely to be confusing to implementors.

(2) I think you're going to have a significant problem getting this through
    the IETF process unless you take a stand on what happens should the
    character assignments in some future Unicode version change in an
    incompatible way. Yes, I know that promises have been made that this will
    never happen again, but that's all they are: Promises. The IETF has a
    policy that it must retain change control over its own standards, and
    this is a case where someone else effectively has change control over
    the actual technical core of this specification. I therefore think that
    this specification needs to say that it aligns automatically with
    all future versions of Unicode that don't make incompatible changes, but
    the minute one is made it stays aligned with the old version until and
    unless the IETF specifically decides otherwise.

				Ned