This would seem on the surface to be a straightforward extension of the 8-bit
DTD (cf. the ERCS proposals).
> A question: was it really extremely difficult to implement Unicode
> support, as many naysayers claim?
No. Unicode support is in fact *much* cleaner than support of the status
quo (EUC, KOI8, ISO 8859/x, etc., often all labeled as ISO 8859/1). On
platforms which do not support Unicode directly, it is necessary to create
tables to map Unicode to local encodings for display, but these tables
are available via FTP from unicode.org.
I am strongly in favor of Unicode support in both HTML and MIME precisely
because it is easier to implement than other multilingual encodings, and
gives better results when combined with language tags.
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation