Re: Require guidance on Unicode in IETF formats

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 03:12:32PM +0000,
 Clive D.W. Feather <clive@demon.net> wrote 
 a message of 42 lines which said:

> should a German speaker be able to name a state or an action
> something in German? If "yes", then we need at least native UTF-8.

I technically disagree. If "yes", then we need the Unicode character
set. It can be in native UTF-8 or as an escape sequence. (See W3C's
distinction between the character model of the Web - always Unicode -
and the many encodings they can use.)

The good things about escape sequences:

* they can be sent / received with 7-bits tools,

* they can be processed with any parsing tool,

* everyone else does it, even XML.

The bad things:

* they are ugly for the writer (the casual reader may see them after a
translation to HTML or SVG or similar so it may not be ugly for him).

* they give a second-class status to non-ASCII characters, which is
bad.

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