Re: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set

Amanda Walker (amanda@intercon.com)
Fri, 5 May 95 17:55:38 EDT

> Opinion: changing the doc charset is NOT an editorial change. If we
> make the doc charset 10646, then applications must support 10646 to
> be conforming. This spec defines conformance, and the fact that
> existing applications support a SUBSET of 10646 does not make it better.

If the spec says that conformance is satisfied by supporting only the first
256 code points of 10646, then that's what conformance is satisfied by.
What, exactly, is the difference between supporting ISO 8859/1 and the first
256 code points of ISO 10646?

Nothing. The first 256 code points of ISO 10646 *are* ISO 8859/1, and were in
fact specifically designed to be so in order to facilitate migration from
8859/1 to 10646. Saying that:

- the document character set for HTML is ISO 10646
- conforming applications MUST interpret the first 256 characters
in ISO 10646, which constitute ISO 8859/1.
- conforming applications MAY interpret additional characters from 10646

has absobloodylutely no effect on 8859/1-wired browsers, servers, or content.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation