Re: Z39.50 character encoding

Pieter Van Lierop wrote:

>  I went back to Ray's mail to see what the
> problem is.What is the problem?The problem is
> that Z39.50 implementations do not use the
> Z39.50 Character Set Negotiation. They have been
> not doing that for many years, so why suddenly
> this becomes a problem?So Ray maybe you could
> tell us which problem we are trying to solve,
> and why, and who wants it to be solved?

It started as an urgent Bath issue, to specify the
character set/encoding of a search term. Character
set negotiation doesn't help much there.  We
kicked that around for awhile, and then Joe Zeeman
suggested that it's probably not productive to
spend much time coming up with a mechanism for
this (i.e. a new attribute, plus a list of values,
and we would need to amend the architecture too)
and he suggested that we declare Z39.50 to be a
unicode/utf-8 protocol, and work backwards from
there. We thought that was a good idea, and that's
where we are now.

So: what problem are we trying to solve?
specifying the encoding of a search term and a
record.  Why not use character set negotiation?
because it doesn't help much. It's oriented
towards message and name strings.  Who want it
solved? Bath, for starts, and just about everyone
else.

--Ray