Modern Network Unicode

BCP18 (RFC 2277) has been the basis for the handling of character- shaped data in IETF specifications for more than a quarter of a century now. It singles out UTF-8 (STD63, RFC 3629) as the “charset” that MUST be supported, and pulls in the Unicode standard with that. Based on this, RFC 5198 both defines common conventions for the use of Unicode in network protocols and caters for the specific requirements of the legacy protocol Telnet. In applications that do not need Telnet compatibility, some of the decisions of RFC 5198 can be cumbersome. The present specification defines “Modern Network Unicode” (MNU), which is a form of RFC 5198 Network Unicode that can be used in specifications that require the exchange of plain text over networks and where just mandating UTF-8 may not be sufficient, but there is also no desire to import all of the baggage of RFC 5198. As characters are used in different environments, MNU is defined in a one-dimensional (1D) variant that is useful for identifiers and labels, but does not use a structure of text lines. A 2D variant is defined for text that is a sequence of text lines, such as plain text documents or markdown format. Additional variances of these two base formats can be used to tailor MNU to specific areas of application.