Re: revised "generic syntax" internet draft

["Martin J. Duerst" <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, 16 Apr 1997, Keld J|rn Simonsen wrote:

> John Klensin writes about use of UTF-8 and penalties in size 
> and readability for various user communities. Some remarks:

> Maybe John wants to be able to use other charsets for encoding
> an URL. I actually proposed some time ago a solution labelling
> the encoding of the URL in a "URL-charset:" header and a
> having UTF-8 as default, and I remember somebody else also proposing
> charset labelling - on the URL line. I have not at this time evaluated 
> such proposals compared to Martin and Frangois's proposals, but it
> is clear that the intended functionality is the same - and my old
> proposal could be seen as an extension to Martin/Frangois - but I
> am not sure it is necessary.

In particular, the "FORM-UTF8: Yes" I proposed is very similar
to your proposal. To be able to label arbitrary "charset"s is
an extension, but I don't think it is needed at this stage of
ISO 10646 and Internet development. The way I put it usually
is that currently, we have "chaos". There is no need to proceed
to "labeled chaos" when we can proceed to "order" directly.
The Universal Character Set really shows off its strength most
directly for short and widely used strings such as URLs.

Regards,	Martin.