- From: Ira Mcdonald <imcdonal@sdsp.mc.xerox.com>
- Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 12:37:54 -0500 (EST)
- To: Harald@Alvestrand.no, ietf-charsets@iana.org, imcdonal@sdsp.mc.xerox.com, yergeau@ALIS.COM
Hi folks, Harald did a good job of concisely listed disadvantages of UTF-16 over the wire and one (possible) advantage. Since Informational has a long history of being used to publich 'for the benefit' of the Internet community' standards from some other standards body or vendor, please let's move forward and register it as Informational. I'd be delighted to see the sense of Harald's list of disadvantages captured in the actual IANA charset registration, so that implementors are sure to see the 'BEWARE'. In a local file store, UTF-16 has some questionable advantages. Over the wire, it just decreases significantly the probability of interworking. The IETF and the UNIX operating system community had it just right when they chose to standardize on UTF-8 based interfaces. I also agree with Martin's sentiment that we should just get this done and published as an RFC. There is a lot of ambiguous XML leaking into the real world by unsafe interfaces. Cheers, - Ira McDonald PS - I think that Harald's point about having terrible expansion for characters outside of Plane 0 (BMP) is very important over the wire. Unicode 3.0 has come markedly closer to *filling* the spare space in Plane 0.
Received on Thursday, 16 December 1999 12:43:13 UTC