[DR609] XP and character encodings

I'm not at all sure why we are working at the character encoding level. Most
other W3C XML specs since XML-Namespaces have been defined in terms of the
Infoset, not the character encoding. I find it worrying that there is no
mention whatsoever of the Infoset in our requirements doc.

I realise that in the 6xx cluster we are talking about protocol bindings but
I don't see any real need to specify a character-encoding. At the end of the
day people will send XML that conforms to the XP spec. Whether that XML is
encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-10646, ISO-8859-x or some binary form
shouldn't matter. Either the other end will be able to decode it or it
won't. If it can't people will either stop calling that end point ( in which
case maybe the implementer will support more encodings ) or the sender will
try a different encoding.

Maybe people will mainly use UTF-8, maybe people will use UTF-16, maybe they
will use a binary XML encoding we don't even have yet. I don't want XP to
restrict the encoding used. Specifying a 'character set of choice' seems
pointless. If we don't *mandate* an encoding ( and I don't think we should )
then let people choose.

Gudge