Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

[Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>]

I concur with the need to maintain the current charset registry to
support legacy apps that use it.  

And I think Ned would be an excellent choice for reviewer, though it
wouldn' t bother me if he could have the assistance of people with
specialized expertise in Asian writing schemes.

As for utf-8 vs. Unicode, this is a bit tricky.  I agree that merely
specifying Unicode isn't sufficient given the potential for
incompatible CESs.  And yet I'm sympathetic to the notion that UTF-8
pessimizes storage and transmission of text written in certain
languages.  IMHO it's unreasonable to exclude the potential for a
Unicode based CES that has more-or-less equivalent information
density across a wide variety of languages.  But I do think that use of
multiple CESs in a new protocol should require substantial
justification, and that UTF-8 should be presumed to be the CES of
choice for any new protocol that requires ASCII compatibility for its
character representation.

Keith