Re: Z39.50 character encoding

Ashley Sanders wrote:

> ...if a utf-8 option is negotiated between origin
> and target is it possible for me to subsequently
> return a UKMARC (or other national format) record?

Yes. The variant feature of the retrieval facility could be used to
overide the utf-8 negotiation.  (There would be no way however to
overide utf-8 for the search term, if the option bit approach, but
not the attribute, is adopted.)


> Would a request for a particular record syntax
> override any utf-8 option bit set at Init time?

Well no, that's not what I had in mind. You would have to explicitly
overide it via a variant request.  What you're suggesting is that
where a particular character set is implicitly associated with a
syntax then requesting that syntax would implicitly overide utf-8?