Re: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set

Erik van der Poel (erik@netscape.com)
Wed, 3 May 95 23:01:32 EDT

> > >>But there's the installed base and the interoperability currently being
> > >>enjoyed (yes, even in Japan).
> > >
> > >Most companies here don't even know what the Internet is, let alone
> > >the WWW (they know the *names*, but that's it).
> >
> > So you're saying that it's OK to destroy the interoperability being
> > enjoyed by the companies that *do* know what the Internet and WWW are?
> > Have you asked them how they feel about this?
>
>Have they asked us how we feel about creating interoperability
>nightmares like this?

Well, it's a little late now. We can blame them for omitting the
charset parameter, but is it fair for us to dictate to them how to
migrate their infrastructure to a more interoperable situation?

>But customers should know that they are
>depending on a particular vendor (or an experiment, in the case of
>Mosaic L10N) when they use them.

Many of the sites are not "customers". They are universities taking
part in this great thing called WWW. Why should anybody consciously
destroy the interoperability that these folks are enjoying?

>If folks want to ensure interoperability, they should represent their
>needs in the open standards forums like this one.

Exactly what I'm doing. But I haven't contacted the Japanese yet,
to see what they think. That is the next step. I'm only mentioning
my own concerns here first.

>We have to weigh the cost of "destroying interoperability" now, since
>there is a certain amount of deployment.

Who's the "we"? You mean this working group? Why would it be fair for
this group to make decisions about "destroying interoperability" in
somebody else's part of the Internet?

>But those concerns must be
>secondary to reliable operation of conforming systems, if we ever hope
>to get out of "bugward compatibility" mode and into reasonable amounts
>of innovation.

Tables are now being proposed for HTML. 3.0, right? So you come up with
a proposal to negotiate the HTML version, because you think that older
HTML clients will not be able to handle the new tables.

What I'm saying is exactly analogous. We are now proposing to have the
servers add the charset parameter to the content-type header. So I'm
asking if it's necessary to "negotiate" the absence/presence of the
charset parameter, because I'm worried that older clients may not be able
to handle content-type headers that include the charset parameter.

Erik