Re: Fwd: Last Call: UTF-16, an encoding of ISO 10646 to Proposed

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>]

At 10:01 14.12.99 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>At 05:07 PM 12/14/99 +0100, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>>My personal opinion is that it should have gone Informational.
>
>If we ever get to the point of putting XML-based protocols on standards 
>track *and* we want to allow those protocols to use UTF-16/LE/BE (because 
>this is allowed by the W3C's XML standard), then I think the UTF-16 
>document should be on standards track. I could certainly see a world where 
>we want XML-based protocols where UTF-16/BE/LE are prohibited; that would 
>be a good world. But if we want to allow interoperable UTF-16 in standards 
>track documents, I think this should be on standards track.

Standards-track documents *can* refer to informational documents.
I can certainly see placing XML-based things on the standards track with 
language that says "MUST use either UTF-8 or UTF-16; SHOULD use UTF-8".
Weakened beyond that, I start feeling unhappy about the XML-based spec, not 
about the sanctity of the references.

There's a reason why we have humans to make these judgment calls.

                        Harald A


--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no