This language seems formally correct but a bit stiff.
I take it that the purpose of this is to try and make the
conditions of conformance upwards compatible, but it
seems a bit tricky to understand the purpose of these
conditions on first reading.
If we are going for a statement of future direction I'd rather
aim to say what we are going to do in plain language, even if
it's not mathematically exact or totally binding.
I think the most important thing is to point out the
implications. Another suggestion:
"Future internationalization of HTML will be based on a
SGML document character set of ISO 10646. For
compatiblity, implementers experimenting
with support for other MIME charsets than ISO-8859-1,
must use ISO 10646 or a subset thereof as the document
character set, and intepret numeric references accordingly
(consistent with ISO 10646)."
-- Albert Lunde Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu