[Asterisk-Dev] IAX spec: Text formats and character sets

[Michael Giagnocavo]

>>Sure, and I think that's agreed to be UTF-8 since that'll allow ASCII-only
>>clients to work o.k. in sending Asterisk data. Now people have been
>talking
>>about actually getting things implemented inside Asterisk.
>>  
>>
>Agreed? By who? A few hours ago people were still posting stuff about 
>ISO8859-1 being in current use. :-\

Yea, I guess agreed on UTF-8 was too strong a phrase. People have said
ISO8859-1 is still in use by certain systems. I don't think anyone is
arguing that IAX shouldn't use Unicode. 

I'm guessing that the main issue would be to use UTF-8 or UCS-2. It really
depends how much text is going to be non-ASCII. If you think that Asian
language users will be big consumers of IAX, then UTF-8 would be more of a
burden (processing as well as size). 

I don't think anyone was suggesting that IAX messages be in ISO 8859-1 or
any other legacy encoding.

At any rate, for globalization, it's good to talk about the internal issues,
since they could have an impact on the protocol specification in multiple
ways. Suppose, for instance, that UTF-8 encoding was extremely complex and
difficult to process, that'd certainly be something to take into
consideration when deciding which wire format to use, no?

-Michael