Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

[ My apologies for replying to a reply ]

Ned Freed <ned.freed <at> mrochek.com> wrote:

>>I wonder if we are reaching the point at which a stronger "use Unicode on
>>the wire" recommendation would be in order.   The implications of such a
>>recommendation would presumably include a 2978bis that made the requirements
>>for registration of a new charset _much_ tougher, e.g., requiring a
>>demonstration that the then-current version of Unicode cannot do the
>>relevant job and/or evidence that the newly-proposed charset is needed in
>>deployed applications.

The time is, IMO, certainly ripe for pushing UTF-8 much stronger, but the place
to do so is *not* at IANA — the registry of assigned names and numbers; protocol
values — but rather in the development of new specifications.

Not even the Unicode Consortium envisions a mass conversation of all legacy
content into, say, UTF-8. The IANA registry's documentary function is quite
orthogonal to the desire to avoid defining new charsets or mandating or even
just enabling legacy charsets in new specifications.

If a charset exists it should, modulo other factors, be registered with IANA.

--

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