W3C Working Draft on character model requirements

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

Dear CHARSET Experts,

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, http://www.w3.org) has just
released the following Working Draft:

Requirements for String Identity Matching and String Indexing 

    World Wide Web Consortium Working Draft 10-July-1998

              http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-charreq


Due to the fact that ISO 10646/Unicode encompases a large number
of legacy encodings, it inherited some duplicate encodings, the
most relevant of which are known under the keywords precomposed
vs. decomposed (for accented characters).

With increased integration of components on the Internet and
the WWW, such duplicates and similar things are more and more
becomming a problem. The I18N WG of the W3C was requested by
other W3C WGs to attack it. Because there are many data exchanges
between the WWW and the other parts of the Internet (e.g. when an
FTP URI is transported in an HTML document and then results in some
FTP protocol action), it is highly desirable to have the same solution
used very widely. To allow this, the W3C I18N WG has as a first
step produced a requirements document. We would greatly welcome
any kind of comments or feedback from the IETF community on the
abovementionned document.



Related to this is PROPOSED DRAFT Unicode Technical Report #15,
by Mark Davis (mark@unicode.org), on Unicode Composition. Again,
any comments are welcome.


Regards,   Martin.