Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

[Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>]

> > Besides MIME incompatibility, 

That aside...

> > because of their BOM
> > dependence (and thus broken string parse/concatenate),
> > UTF-16-[endian] and UTF-32-[endian]

This is in incorrect characterization of those CES's.

UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE (and UTF-32BE and UTF-32LE) explicitly
*disallow* BOM, and thus are *not* broken for string parse/concatenate.

The UTF-16 encoding scheme (no "LE", no "BE") is the one that
interprets an initial U+FEFF as a BOM.

> > are unsuitable for 
> > wire protocols (the proper sphere of the IETF).

By the way, I'm not arguing that any of those are particularly suitable 
for a wire protocol, compared to UTF-8 -- just noting that the
dependence on BOM does *not* occur for any of the explicit BE or LE
CES's.

--Ken

> 
> agree.  but I would not want to preclude future use of a better CES than 
> utf-8.  I just don't think it exists yet.