Re: Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-utf16-03.txt

[Chris Newman <chris.newman@INNOSOFT.COM>]

Before this goes to last call, I just wanted to say that permitting
multiple byte orderings in this context has a high probability of leading
to interoperability problems similar to past problems caused by permitting
multiple endian orders in a protocol.

My intention with this comment is simply to make my technical assessment
clear.  I see little value in pushing this issue or making a last call
comment because:

(1) This issue has been debated to death alrady.

(2) There is a lot of "religion" involved in the issue and further debate
will likely not help.

(3) I know this was agreed to by the Unicore group which is a smart group
that knows more about character sets than I do.

(4) If UTF-16 has interoperability problems, it will just strengthen
support for UTF-8 and RFC 2277.  Since I think UTF-8 is a better solution
in most cases anyway, I see little merit in fighting to make UTF-16 more
attractive.

		- Chris