Andr'e PIRARD writes:
The _most_important_point_ is that a single common representation code
be defined _for_the_line_ (suiting the purpose, namely to cover all national
languages in one single way) and that people be instructed that every bit
of text should travel in that code on the wire, whatever_the_protocol_is.
I agree to most of what Andre '' is saying and I have an additional
point here: that the single common representation code should be something
that can be handled by existing software and hardware, because it
will take a long time before the conversion software is installed
on all machines, or even a large share of the installed base.
Also I would like to emphasis the need for world-wide solutions.
This would mean that ISO 8859-1 would not be a good candidate,
we need something ASCII based (or even with a smaller repertoire
than ASCII to cover the problems with EBCDIC and national ISO 646
variants).
I have proposed such a solution in RFC1345.
Keld