- From: Ashley Sanders <zzaascs@irwell.mimas.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 15:05:05 +0000
- To: zig <www-zig@w3.org>
Ray wrote:
> > We are going to have to profile (through an implementors agreement) which
> > record syntaxes the UTF-8 negotiation applies to.
> No, no, no! Please, no profiling or implementor agreements! If the
> sentiment is that there are going to be certain syntaxes that the utf-8
> negotiation will not apply to, then let's nail the list down, and include it
> in the definition. We do implementor agreements after the fact, because we
> discover that a definition isn't sufficient.
We seem to be forgetting that not all record syntaxes deliver
textual data. We have registered OIDs for record syntaxes such as
as pdf, png, mpeg, jpeg, etc, etc. Are we saying that if utf8 has
been negotiated then all these record syntaxes should be in utf-8
as well -- clearly not. Therefore I don't see why negotiated utf8
should say anything at all about any record syntax, be it SUTRS,
GRS-1, MARC or anything else. There needs to be another mechanism
for requesting a record syntax in a particular character set.
Heaven knows what this will be. I don't think sending a MARC
record inside a GRS-1 wrapper is a viable alternative. There are
enough origins out there that cannot cope with SUTRS, never mind
MARC inside GRS-1.
I do think that z39.50 ought to be made a unicode application,
but I don't see how you can mandate that retrieved records must
also be in unicode. As Mike has said several times, records are
EXTERNAL.
Ashley.
--
Ashley Sanders a.sanders@mcc.ac.uk
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Received on Monday, 4 March 2002 10:05:13 UTC