Re: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set

Erik van der Poel (erik@netscape.com)
Fri, 5 May 95 18:02:08 EDT

>I remain unconvinced that now is the time to put ISO10646 in HTML 2.0,
>other than as an appendix or note.

Although I think that 10646 could be a good way to extend numeric
entities, I agree that it should not be specified in HTML 2.0, which
says:

This specification roughly corresponds to the capabilities of HTML
in common use prior to June 1994.

The real concern is that people are using or will use numeric
entities above 255 in various, incompatible ways. We could try to
avoid that by adding a note to the section that describes numeric
entities:

NOTE: There is no specification regarding numeric entities greater
than 255, but members of the working group <pointer to WG here>
are discussing the use of ISO 10646 as the "document character set".

Even if we do specify 10646 as the document character set (which I'm
against for 2.0), we would definitely need a conformance clause that
says that conforming agents don't need to support numeric entities
above 255. There just isn't enough 10646 support out there (in the
OS's and fonts).

Erik

PS I seem to recall similar discussions in the MIME working group
way back when...