- From: Hugo Haas <hugo@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 17:28:27 -0500
- To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
- Cc: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
From the 2nd draft requirements document[1]: DR609 The XP specification should mandate the use of UTF-8 as its character set of choice. Discussion: There is a very good discussion currently on the WG private mailing list about this topic, when this discussion recedes we can formulate the requirement from the consensus. I talked to Martin Dürst and Misha Wolf about this again. First, this DR should talk about character encoding, not characted set. Second, the answer to the question "can you encode any character you want with UTF-8" is "almost". Misha mentionned some Egyptian hieroglyphs not expressable in UTF-8. Finally, they reiterated the comments made by Martin by email[2]. His conclusion was: On Wed, Nov 8, 2000, Martin J. Duerst wrote: [..] > So overall I suggest: > > - Don't fix on 'UTF-8 only' or 'more than UTF-8' now. > - Make clear in the Req doc that that's something that will > have to be decided. > - Get feedback and evaluate tradeoffs. Basically, there a lot of reasons why we would want to restrict XP to UTF-8, and a lot of other reasons why considering a larger set of character encodings would be a good idea. However, they think that it is premature to want to resolve this problem now. They suggested that we get back to the I18N WG when we have more input. I suggest that in order to ask for feedback we keep DR609 as a DR and rephrase it as: The XP specification may or may not mandate the use of UTF-8 as its character encoding of choice. Discussion: The Working Group is aware of the complexity resulting in the use of a large set of character encodings but is unable at this point in time to make a decision on such a restriction. That way, we are postponing the issue and inviting comments both from the I18N WG and other people. 1. http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/xp-reqs-02 2. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-xml-protocol-wg/2000Nov/0226.html -- Hugo Haas - W3C/MIT mailto:hugo@w3.org - http://www.w3.org/People/Hugo/ - tel:+1-617-452-2092
Received on Friday, 1 December 2000 17:28:29 UTC