[OAI-implementers] UTF-16 Metadata

[Henry Stern]

I've run into a little stopping place with the OAI protocol.  Only the UTF-8
character encoding is permitted which eliminates the possibility of
internationalization.

I propose that the protocol definition be slightly altered to allow for
different encodings to be used.  Since the processing instruction in the
header of the XML document specifies which character encoding is being used,
this shouldn't be any trouble.

Aside from that, it's completely backwards compatible with all of the
existing repositories and it won't be a big deal for your average harvester.

Let me know what you think.

Henry Stern

---
Flon's Law:
	There is not now, and never will be, a language in
	which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs.