This is a reasonable position to take and I support it. However, it is not
directly relevant to character set issues because it isn't possible to
simply
enbrace the work done by other groups. The problem in a nutshell is that
there's too much work done by too many groups with entirely different
agendas,
resulting in conflicting, competing, and overlapping standards.
Well, I do not think that the effort is out of reach.
In RFC1345 a vast number of charsets are specified and registred
for MIME use, and they can be handled uniformly according to
a model which is not that voluminous, RFC 1345 prose is about 10 pages.
The Unicode people has done a similar effort.
Keld, there is a huge difference between identifying all the character sets and
recommending which ones people should use to get maximum interoperability.
I entirely support your effort to get all the character sets enumerated in a
document. I use the results of your work myself every day. But I cannot
recommend that just because you have enumerated them all that people can run
around using whatever they feel like out of your huge list. Not only is this
not a reasonable burden to place on all systems on the Internet, the evaluation
and selection of character sets and encoding is a complex task we cannot ask
system and network managers to do on their own.
There is an IETF specification in RFC1345, which demonstrates that
embracing all of the character set world is doable, it can be done
with about 10 pages of prose (which is not outrageous compared to other
IETF specifications) and the stuff is specified without ambiguity.
Elegance is a matter of taste, so I won't comment on that.
What Ned is looking for has already been accomplished within IETF.
I must once again disagree. The reason character set issues keep coming back to
haunt us isn't our failure to define and enumerate them; it is instead our
failure to provide adequate usage guidelines and conformance specifications.
These issues are not dealt with by your documents at all and there is no reason
why they should be.
You set out to describe a wide variety of character sets. I would call the
result quite successful. But we now have to choose what character sets we're
going to recommend for use in messaging. This is not to say that other
characters will never be used; they certainly will be. But there has to be a
core specification that defines what is absolutely essential and what is most
useful.
Your efforts also don't deal with the issue of how full ISO10646 gets
canonicalized. And this in turn begs the question of what we mean when we
say "character set", which is what we are currently discussing.
Finally, my point here was in no way meant to imply that catalogs of
standard character aren't useful or don't exist. They are and they do. I was
simply responding to Dave's contention that character set issues are not
something we should deal with. I'm still convinced they're something we
have to deal with, like it or not.
Ned