Re: UCS-2/4 & BOM

[Erik van der Poel <erik@vanderpoel.org>]

Markus Scherer wrote:
> The IANA character sets list
> (http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets) says:
> 
> <quote>
> Name: ISO-10646-UCS-2
> MIBenum: 1000
> Source: the 2-octet Basic Multilingual Plane, aka Unicode
>         this needs to specify network byte order: the standard
>         does not specify (it is a 16-bit integer space)
> Alias: csUnicode
> </quote>
> 
> I interpret this to mean that these are CEFs, not CESs or charsets.

The term "network byte order" is often used in network protocol 
communities, and it means big-endian (see e.g. RFC 951 section 3). So, 
another interpretation of "this needs to specify network byte order" is 
that this charset registration entry still needs to be amended to 
properly specify that "they" have big-endian in mind. I personally think 
that this is more likely to be the intended interpretation, though I 
wouldn't argue with anyone saying that the wording is unclear.

I'm Cc-ing the ietf-charsets list, in the hope that this entry might be 
clarified (along with the UCS-4 entry).

Erik van der Poel