Re: [EAI] Unicode vs. UTF-8 / Encoding vs. Representation

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 11:17:32PM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:

> I hope someone in the WG will have a good suggestion.   If not,
> we may be back to "ASCII" versus "non-ASCII" as the disjoint
> pair, "Unicode"  to describe the international CCS (inclusive of
> ASCII), and "UTF-8" to describe the particular encoding that is
> used for this protocol and recommended by RFC 2277 (a
> recommendation that is reinforced by draft-iab-idn-encoding and
> other more recent work).

It seems to me that one could take a cue from the IDNA work, which
differentiated A-label, U-label, LDH-label, and so on.

I haven't thought about this too carefully, have barely had time to
follow the discussion, and won't have time to think about it much more
for the next 3 weeks, but perhaps something like "A-set" for the
ASCII-only characters, "U-set" for all Unicode characters, and (ugly)
"X-set" for the set of characters that are in Unicode eXcluding the
ASCII subset?  I know that introducing and rigorously defining new
terms is hard (to return to the IDNA analogy, it took a _lot_ of time
to work out those precise definitions), but it seems that confusion
may continue otherwise.

Feel free to point and laugh.  This might just be a bad idea.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]