Re: Last Call: UTF-16

From: John Cowan (cowan@locke.ccil.org)
Date: Mon Aug 16 1999 - 12:34:01 EDT


Frank da Cruz wrote:

> That doesn't mean the IETF should start registering Macintosh code pages as
> standard charsets. It means that whoever creates a private code page should
> provide an official mapping to a well-defined international standard
> character set that contains the same repertoire.

And when there are no such charsets, other than ISO 10646?

> In the meantime, of course every company tries to get a leg up on the others
> by getting us hooked on items that are not standardized, like em-dashes and
> "fl" ligatures.

If they are in the data, they are in the data.

> Certainly tagging is better than not tagging. But if you are referencing
> nonstandard encodings in your tags (e.g. charsets not in the IR),

If your definition of "standard" is "in the IR", then you have a
very broad definition of "standard" indeed.

> Why? We don't need hundreds of redundant character sets in the IR.

We already have them. The whole point of the IR is to register
the de facto character sets out there. I'm not sure how big the
IR is now, but surely over 150 character sets already.

> In any case, most of these sets won't qualify since they use their
> C1 areas for graphics.

This restriction is imposed by ISO 2022, not the IR, IMHO.

-- 
	John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan	cowan@ccil.org
Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! / Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.
			-- Coleridge / Politzer



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