VOTable 1.6 Working Draft

[Mark Taylor]

Dear apps,

The first published working draft for VOTable 1.6 is now available at
https://www.ivoa.net/Documents/VOTable/20260413/.

While there may be some additional work on this draft before
advancing it to a PR, the hope is that it contains more-or-less
final text on the new handling of the char datatype, namely
interpreting char bytes as UTF-8 rather than 7-bit ASCII.
This is expected to be the most significant difference between
VOTable 1.5 and 1.6.  The relevant changes are in the text
concerning handling of the char and unicodeChar datatypes
in sections 2.1, 2.2 and 6.

Anybody implementing VOTable I/O is encouraged to review
this text and update their implementations accordingly.
Any feedback (on this list, at https://github.com/ivoa-std/VOTable,
or directly to interested parties) from such implementation efforts
is very welcome.

An example Unicode-heavy VOTable that may be useful for testing
can currently be found at https://github.com/ivoa-std/VOTable/pull/75/.

A prototype STIL/STILTS/TOPCAT implementation that can read/write
VOTable 1.6 including UTF-8 char data is available at
https://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/mbt/releases/topcat/pre/topcat-full_votable1.6.jar

Mark

--
Mark Taylor  Astronomical Programmer  Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk          https://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/mbt/