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John writes:
As long as the problem is couched as "European", then there are
certainly simple 16-bit solutions that will satisfy "everyone" and it may
be that, with a little head-knocking-together, a 8-bit solution is
possible (where "8-bit" implies something on the order of 190 to 222
graphic characters and "16-bit" implies something in the 64 K range).
I posted the charter of the RARE Character sets group and you know
RARE is the european organization of research networks and you have
to consider that the charter has european flavor. I posted it just as an
information/invitation for cooperation.
Unfortunately, 8-bit coding does not solve the european problems.
ISO 8859/1 is not enough for "west" european language, i.e some letters
are missing for french and in addition we need for central Europe
ISO 8859/2 and for Cyrillic ISO 8859/5 and for an additional coding
table for Greek. So, we expect a 16-bit coding to solve our problems.
The idea is to register an European Repertoire taken out of Unicode
or ISO 10 646, but however the products should be 16-bit based and then
some users in Europe (I am sure that there are many of them) interested
in other languages will have capabilities in their equipment to interchange
data written in some other languages or for some other applications.
The transmission capabilities of the network will be the same for all
of us!
As several other people have pointed out, if one community wants to
agree on a character set for use within that community, all it has to do
procedurally is to come up with a clear definition and register that
will IANA. And no one should have much objection to that other than
a general concern that fewer options (e.g., alternative character sets)
gives us better interoperability.
But the draft you posted uses the term "standard" several times. I
think that, at this stage in its development, it would not serve the
Internet community well to standardize on -- and start migrating toward --
anything that does not accomodate the vast majority of languages in use
(or likely to be in use in the near future) on the extended mail
internet.
Standars as a term was used in the context of MIME. In MIME you are
referencing to Character Sets coded standards (ASCII, ISO 8859,
ISO 10646) and the same meaning is given in the charter.
Passion and flaming by various people aside, the difficult
discussions of the last few weeks probably point to something important
-- something that everyone who has tried seriously to work out
international character set issues in any forum knows by experience:
The problems involved are very hard, and people care deeply about
representations of their character sets that conform to their local
norms. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be faced, but it does mean that
careful listening and understanding is very important.
I agree with you that the issue is very hard and sensitive.
Can we either open this up to a worldwide solution or be very
specific about why you are looking for a "European" solution and think
that is appropriate?
The Internet is a worldwide net and we have to work on some
common denominator. The vendors are also expecting some guidance from us
- the users. The net people are not very loud regarding their needs
and problems regarding the international character sets.
Borka