Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

Terje Bless <link@pobox.com> Thu, 07 September 2006 17:40 UTC

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Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:03:23 +0200
From: Terje Bless <link@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer
To: Ted Hardie <hardie@qualcomm.com>
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Cc: discuss@apps.ietf.org, Ned Freed <ned.freed@mrochek.com>, ietf-charsets@iana.org
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[ My apologies for replying to a reply ]

Ned Freed <ned.freed@mrochek.com> wrote:

>>I wonder if we are reaching the point at which a stronger "use Unicode on
>>the wire" recommendation would be in order.   The implications of such a
>>recommendation would presumably include a 2978bis that made the requirements
>>for registration of a new charset _much_ tougher, e.g., requiring a
>>demonstration that the then-current version of Unicode cannot do the
>>relevant job and/or evidence that the newly-proposed charset is needed in
>>deployed applications.

The time is, IMO, certainly ripe for pushing UTF-8 much stronger, but the place
to do so is *not* at IANA — the registry of assigned names and numbers; protocol
values — but rather in the development of new specifications.

Not even the Unicode Consortium envisions a mass conversation of all legacy
content into, say, UTF-8. The IANA registry's documentary function is quite
orthogonal to the desire to avoid defining new charsets or mandating or even
just enabling legacy charsets in new specifications.

If a charset exists it should, modulo other factors, be registered with IANA.

-- 
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