[Ietf-calsify] Character set restriction in section 4.3.11 Text

[Mark Crispin]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2006, Bernard Desruisseaux wrote:
> The result is that some iCalendar applications currently output
> iCalendar objects in ISO-8859-1.

How many of these are there?  Is this widespread?

>    b.3) UTF-8, US-ASCII, and ISO-8859-1 only.
> At this point I favor option (b.3).

I strongly oppose any proposal that grants special status to ISO-8859-1.

Leaving aside the fundamental wrongness of grantly clemency to lazy 
European implementors without doing the same for lazy Russian, Chinese, 
Japanese, Korean, etc. implementors, ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) is deprecated. 
As all of us should be well-aware of by now, the approved ISO 8859 variant 
for use in the EU is ISO-8859-15 (Latin-9 a.k.a. Latin-0).

If ISO-8859-1 were to be exempted, even if just for legacy purposes, 
sooner or later some ding-dong will complain about "ignorant Americans" 
whose "broken" specifications "deny" Europe use of several European 
characters and even the EU currency sign.  Clearly a conspiracy by George 
Bush, the NRA, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and the Walt Disney company... ;-)

We don't know that there aren't any lazy implementor out there that have 
done an iCalendar application using KOI8-R, or GBK, or ISO-2022-JP (more 
likely, Shift-JIS), or KSC.  If we take a firm stand and say "iCalendar is 
Unicode only", we would have moral authority to stand firm should such 
lazy implementors complain.  We'd lose it if we had already made a special 
exception for ISO-8859-1.

We don't always avoid mistakes; but this is one we can definitely 
recognize now and avoid.

Thus, I believe that our choices are:
  . prohibit all charsets other than UTF-8 and US-ASCII (and, to be
    honest, I'd prefer to prohibit US-ASCII as well)
  . allow any charset

If ISO-8859-1 has truly reared its ugly head into calendar and can't be 
exterminated, then I regrettably conclude that "allow any charset" is the 
only viable alternative.

-- Mark --

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