Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

[Ned Freed <ned.freed@mrochek.com>]

> 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.

Any such assistance would be hugely welcome. As an aside, it would also be nice
if more people would post comments to the list...

> 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.

This is pretty much where I'm at as well. I have no problem with UTF-16 or
UTF-32 if there is a compelling reason to allow them, but I really want to at
least try and close the door to additional CESes to the greatest extent
possible. Of course this is really an issue for the IAB and not the charset
reviewer - thank goodness.

				Ned