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UCS Character Set
charter-ietf-ucs-01

Document Charter UCS Character Set WG (ucs)
Title UCS Character Set
Last updated 1993-08-01
State Approved
WG State Concluded
IESG Responsible AD (None)
Charter edit AD (None)
Send notices to (None)

charter-ietf-ucs-01

Draft Charter 6/21/93 - mdw

We are in the process of building global directory systems and other
information services on the global Internet. In many parts of the world
it is seen as essential for the success of the global services that they
should be able to recognize, store, and present textual information like
personal and organizational names, represented in the character sets
used
by those concerned. This means that the Directory must be able to
handle
national characters not found in the US-ASCII repertoire. The same
applies
to the other global information services on the network (e.g., the
databases
used in many information servers). This is especially a problem as
information services are provided for clients on various different
hardware
architectures.

Currently, for the Western European languages at least 5 different
encodings
are in use on the network: ISO-7 National Variants, ISO 8859/1, ROMAN8,
T.61, and RC850. (See RFC1345 for further information on these
character
sets.) If you consider the other scripts used in Europe and the other
encodings the number of different character set codes rise to as many as
40. This is the real (and messy) world we live in. Changing the
character
sests in this world is not an option, as curent systems run applications
which can support only the character sets used by that system.

However, a universal encoding has begun to appear: UCS (ISO 10646).
Initial
experience with this solution has been positive. However, there are
still
many issues to be addressed in the context of ISO 10 646 and the other
character set codes, which will exist on the Internet in the future:

(1) Can we agree on some common network services/model for character set
handling?

(2) Should a general-purpose SW tool be designed that will support both
UCS and regional character sets?

(3) Is there a solution that will make character set convertors for
different
codes ``plug-and-play'' (i.e., an API) without specifying the actual
underlying implementation? Can we use UCS as a common denominator
for
that?

(4) Is it necessary to have a document identifying the language and the
character sets which cater to a particular language?

(5) If we need to solve these problems and UCS (ISO 10 646) is the only
available general option today which is maybe close to be
sufficient,
can we start with UCS and make minimal changes or specifications
which
will be sufficient for our needs. Can we discuss the missing
agreement/specifications required in the communication protocols
such as:

(a) The order of octets in the interchange of data is left to be 
    specified by the sender and the recipient in UCS.  What are the 
    ``sender'' and ``recipient'' on the Internet?  Can we define a 
    mechanism to identify the serialized byte order of a data

stream?

(b) Additional encoding mechanisms for the UCS have been proposed.

Do
these schemes have any merit?

(c) Some amount of profiling may be necessary for UCS use in some 
    particular countries, do we need to specify that globally or we
    can leave it to a particular region to be solved as regional

matter?

(d) Do we need to differentiate or specify how tagged data (i.e.,

the
field type in a database) and how ``serialized byte order'' data
are treated in a communication protocol or will some common
specification for the tag and the type be suffient?

The goal of the BOF is to test the interest for the various issues. If
possible a clear set of issues could be identified then working group(s)
will be defined.