Unicode in VOTable

[Walter Landry]

Mark Taylor <m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Aug 2014, Markus Demleitner wrote:
> 
>> Now, if we go this way: Why have a new type at all?  I'd maintain no
>> existing valid VOTable would break if we just said something essentially
>> like:
>> 
>>   VOTable considers char as byte streams that can be decoded from utf-8
>>   for presentation purposes.   TABLEDATA encoding is presentation.
>>   arraysize refers to the length of the bytestream always, never to
>>   the length of any unicode code sequence decodeable from the byte
>>   stream.
> 
> Yes, I think that would work.  "TABLEDATA encoding is presentation"
> seems like a rather radical statement in terms of the way one
> usually thinks about VOTable, but I can't think of any actual
> negative consequences.

This sounds a lot like what I proposed back in March, so I like it
too ;)  It would be good if we could do the same thing for unicodeChar
and UTF-16.

Cheers,
Walter Landry