RE: [idn] Comments on protocol drafts

[Karlsson Kent - keka <keka@im.se>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ned.freed@innosoft.com [mailto:ned.freed@innosoft.com]
...
> Um, let's be careful here. The presence or absence of a given group of
> characters is a coded character set (CCS) issue. My 
> understanding is that work
> is underway to define codepoints for these and many other 
> missing characters in
> the Unicode CCS, and hopefully ISO 10646 will adopt what the 
> UTC does in this
> regard.

It is the IRG (Ideographic Rapporteur Group) that
constructs the proposals on ideographs to be set before
SC2/WG2.  UTC has only one vote in the IRG (if that is
of importance to anyone here).  The UTC definitely don't
construct the proposals on ideographs, though it does
review them, as does SC2/WG2.  The IRG has representatives
from Japan, Taiwan, (mainland) China, South Korea, and
Hong Kong at least.

> Once the codepoints exist they are applicable to any 
> character encoding scheme
> (CES) that applies to Unicode/10646 and isn't limited to 
> plane 0. This includes
> UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-4, UTF-7, CIDNUC, and probably UTF-5. The 
> only CES I know of
> that is limited to plane 0 is UCS-2, and nobody is talking 
> about using UCS-2. 

Well, there is this thing about mobile (am.: cellular) phones.
GSM phone standards (the very little I know about them) talk about
UCS-2, not UTF-16, as yet.  That may stay so for quite a while
after more "stationary" computer systems can handle UTF-16.
And yes, cellular phones is of significance here, for sending
and receiving e-mail as well as other "WAP" applications
(see http://www.wapforum.org/).  WAP is not neccesarily limited
to GSM, but GSM is the most(?) major set of specifications for
cellular phone systems.

B.t.w. UTF-7 has been withdrawn by the Unicode consortium
(it was never an ISO standard encoding).  SCSU is still there
(UTR 6), but I don't think it is suitable for IDNs (it's a
stateful encoding).

		Kind regards
		/kent k