Re: comments: UTF-16, an encoding of ISO 10646 to Informational

From: Frank da Cruz (fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 18 1999 - 11:43:08 EDT


> The current state of the draft is what it is precisely because of a
> perceived consensus that the IETF is NOT in a position to legislate byte
> order.
>
But it is. If the IETF allows UTF-16 to be sent in different byte orders,
it is legislating that every application has to be coded for every byte order,
instead of just one. How is that better than legislating that every
application should be coded to put only one byte order on the wire and expect
only one from the wire? If we allowed this sort of waffling with (e.g.)
IP addresses, the Internet wouldn't even work.

- Frank



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