Re: [MMUSIC] Last Call: <draft-ietf-mmusic-rfc4566bis-34.txt> (SDP: Session Description Protocol) to Proposed Standard

[Paul Kyzivat <[e-mail]>]

On 4/11/19 4:14 AM, Magnus Westerlund wrote:
> MMUSIC WG, Document Editors
> 
> In the processing of draft-ietf-mmusic-data-channel-sdpneg-25 an 
> interesting question arose regarding text strings in SDP attribute values.
> 
> Currently the document says:
> 
> 4.5. Internationalization
> 
>     The SDP specification recommends the use of the ISO 10646 character
>     set in the UTF-8 encoding [RFC3629] to allow many different languages
>     to be represented.  However, to assist in compact representations,
>     SDP also allows other character sets such as ISO 8859-1 to be used
>     when desired.  Internationalization only applies to free-text sub-
>     fields (session name and background information), and not to SDP as a
>     whole.
> 
> If one like to include UTF-8 field for attributes it would be good if
> the requirement would be clear going forward that there is an expectancy
> that at least parser can process any UTF-8 strings that may occur in any
> fields.
> 
> That would allow future SDP field values to use UTF-8 strings without risks
> and simplify processing. Like in the case of the data channel SDP mapping
> where the extra step of encoding lable characters not visually safe as escaped
> characters could be avoided.
> 
> Does anyone have input if making such a change would have significant impact on
> the interoperability?

I'm inclined to just say that attribute values are limited to values 
that are natively representable in the chosen charset. That will impose 
limitations on use with charsets more limited than UTF-8.

	Thanks,
	Paul