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Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

This appears to have bounced from ietf-charsets at iana.org on first send. --
MD

On 9/6/06, Mark Davis <mark.davis at icu-project.org> wrote: 

If the registry provided an unambiguous, stable definition of each charset
identifier in terms of an explicit, available mapping to Unicode/10646
(whether the UTF-8 form of Unicode or the UTF-32 code points -- that is just
a difference in format, not content), it would indeed be useful. However, I
suspect quite strongly that it is a futile task. There are a number of
problems with the current registry.

1. Poor registrations (minor)
There are some registered charset names that are not syntactically
compliant to the spec.

2. Incomplete (more important)
There are many charsets (such as some windows charsets) that are not in
the registry, but that are in *far* more widesprecause of the already existing ubiquity of UTF-8 in those

contexts.

 But I do think that use of
multiple CESs in a new protocol should require substantial
justification, and that UTF-8 should be presumed to be the CES of
choice for any new protocol that requires ASCII compatibility for its
character representation.


I agree completely with that assessment.

--Ken


Keith