1. Introduction

As the Internet grows throughout the world the requirement to support character sets outside of the ASCII [ASCII] / Latin-1 [ISO-8859] character set becomes ever more urgent. For FTP, because of the large installed base, it is paramount that this is done without breaking existing clients and servers. This document addresses this need. In doing so it defines a solution which will still allow the installed base to interoperate with new clients and servers.

This document enhances the capabilities of the File Transfer Protocol by removing the 7-bit restrictions on pathnames used in client commands and server responses, RECOMMENDs the use of a Universal Character Set (UCS) ISO/IEC 10646 [ISO-10646], RECOMMENDs a UCS transformation format (UTF) UTF-8 [UTF-8], and defines a new command for language negotiation.

The recommendations made in this document are consistent with the recommendations expressed by the IETF policy related to character sets and languages as defined in RFC 2277 [RFC2277].

1.1. Requirements Terminology

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [BCP14].