Subject: RE: Character encoding for Netconf messages?

From: "McDonald, Ira" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 11:02:17 -0700

Hi,

The IESG policy on charsets has been stable for years,
since publication of BCP 18/RFC 2277 (January 1998).
Verbatim from section 3.1 'What charset to use':

  "All protocols MUST identify, for all character data, which charset is
   in use.

   Protocols MUST be able to use the UTF-8 charset, which consists of
   the ISO 10646 coded character set combined with the UTF-8 character
   encoding scheme, as defined in [10646] Annex R (published in
   Amendment 2), for all text.

   Protocols MAY specify, in addition, how to use other charsets or
   other character encoding schemes for ISO 10646, such as UTF-16, but
   lack of an ability to use UTF-8 is a violation of this policy; such a
   violation would need a variance procedure ([BCP9] section 9) with
   clear and solid justification in the protocol specification document
   before being entered into or advanced upon the standards track."

So, either an IETF standards-track protocol MUST only support
UTF-8 (so that tagging is irrelevant over the wire) or it MUST
always tag the charset in use in every over-the-wire message.

If Netconf permits the use of UTF-16 over the wire without an
'encoding' attribute in the XML declaration, then Netconf needs
a variance - not easy to get.

Cheers,
- Ira

Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI  49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: [email-masked]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On
> Behalf Of Andy Bierman
> Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 6:56 PM
> To: Randy Presuhn
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: Character encoding for Netconf messages?
> 
> 
> Randy Presuhn wrote:
> > Hi -
> > 
> > If we specify a mandatory-to-implement encoding, I'd 
> strongly suggest
> > that it be UTF-8.
> > 
> 
> Excellent topic for a VERY TBD WG work item!!!  :-)
> 
> (I agree with you, but I'm coding for internationalization.)
> 
> That's not an easy decision, or one that should be made
> as part of some ad-hoc design process.
> 
> 
> > Randy
> 
> Andy
> 
> 
> > 
> > ----- Original Message ----- 
> > From: "Kent Watsen" <[email-masked]>
> > To: <[email-masked]>
> > Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 7:46 PM
> > Subject: Character encoding for Netconf messages?
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > The Netconf spec does not require XML declarations (i.e. <?xml
> > version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>).  However, both the SSH and SOAP
> > mapping specs show the use of XML declarations; though the 
> BEEP mapping
> > spec does not...  
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > Should NetConf specify a mandatory encoding (e.g. USASCII) 
> or leave it
> > up to implementations to decide?   If it is up to the 
> implementations to
> > decide, then would that require the client to defer sending 
> its <hello>
> > until after receiving the server's <hello> in order to determine the
> > encoding to use?
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > Would it make sense for the <hello> to be USASCII and to list all
> > supported encodings as capabilities? - this seems flexible 
> but then the
> > NetConf spec would need to require an XML declaration on 
> every message
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > 
> > Kent
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > --
> > 
> > Kent Watsen
> > 
> > Software Architect
> > 
> > Juniper Networks
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > to unsubscribe send a message to [email-masked] with
> > the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
> > archive: <http://ops.ietf.org/lists/netconf/>
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> --
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> 

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