Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

[Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>]

At 06:45 06/09/07, Keith Moore wrote:
>I concur with the need to maintain the current charset registry to
>support legacy apps that use it.  

I concur with Keith (and it seems almost everybody else) that we
still need a charset registry.

>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.

He would certainly have my assistance, for whatever it's worth.

>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.

True. The most affected languages are not CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean),
but all the scripts that have most of their characters beyond
U+0800 but don't need two bytes to encode the particular script,
i.e. all the Indian Scripts, and so on. A serious part of the
overhead is often (but not always) compensated by the fact that
protocol or markup information is usually heavily ascii-biased.


Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp