Re: Revised language on: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Sun, 7 May 95 16:08:52 EDT

> |To support non-western writing systems, a larger character repertoire
> |will be specified in a future version of HTML. The document character
> |set will be ISO10646, or some subset that agrees with ISO10646; in
> |particular, all numeric character references must use code positions
> |assigned by ISO10646.

I think this is good language (assuming we take the option of
indicating future directions).

It does seem like while declaring ISO10646 as the document character set
should cause no problems for existing Latin-1 documents, it raises
questions of interpretation when one goes beyond that.

The kind of questions we've been asking the last few days like exactly
what does it mean to support subsets of ISO10646 and what are the
implications for format negotiation of allowing numeric references
greater than 255 would be better put off to an internationalization
document.

If we put in ISO10646 now, we need to be very focused: we shouldn't try
to solve all the "big" issues .

-- 
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu