- From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald.t.alvestrand@delab.sintef.no>
- Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1993 12:45:45 +0200
- To: ietf-charsets@INNOSOFT.COM
> So, has everybody on this list agreed that > > we should provide a single universal encoding of text usable > by (almost) all existing protocols so that we do not have to > extend all the protocols Not so fast..... I would regard the "right way" to recognize that the IETF is NOT the world's greatest expert body on character sets, and behave accordingly. We *are* (in my completely fair and unbiased opinion :-) the world's greatest experts in making workable agreements for communication over computer networks. This means that: - We should keep our minds open for, and expect to see within the next 10 years, a single standard blessed by ISO that has all the properties that we desire, and should be adopted by us. - We should do whatever we need to do to get things to work in the meantime. I've got an idea that this requires our protocols to do character set *labelling*, and that character set *switching* may not be required, since there should be only approximately 4 things to label: - US-ASCII - ISO 8859-1 (and other temporary, traditional means like 2022-jp) - Our 10-year hack - The "Final Solution". There is a great deal of verbiage to be added in the design goals for the 10-year hack. Forgive me if I try to make it clearer. > > Assuming so, has everybody agreed that the encoding should > > be for plain text processing If you mean "be able to represent plain text, but we should ignore the issues of underlining, emphasis, font size and so on", I agree. > > be ASCII compatible If you mean "be able to represent US-ASCII as a proper subset", I agree. I'm not sure that the requirement to let US-ASCII text be legal text in the encoding is a necessary requirement. > > be universal If you mean "be able to encode all known and tabulated writing systems, and be extensible to cover new ones as they are tabulated", yes. > > satisfy causality Causality = no 2 glyphs are represented by the same octet string sequence. (The non-unification requirement) (watch out for meaning of the word "glyph) > > have finitestateness Finitestateness - all glyph sequences generatable by the encoding can be enumerated. Note the possible conflict with "universal". Yes. > > is finitely resynchronizable Yes. > > Any opinion? Yes. :-) Harald Tveit Alvestrand --Boundary (ID uEbHHWxWEwCKT9wM3evJ5w)
Received on Monday, 2 August 1993 03:46:40 UTC