To open another can of worms, I think that we can live without character set specification. We can stablish that the character set is always unicode, and to deal only with encodings. Ascii is an encoding that maps directly to codepoints and only allows 0-127 values. iso-8859-1 is the same with 0-255 range. Any other 8 bit encoding just need a translation table. The only point to solve is we need some special way to work with fixed-8 with no intended character representation.
-- Salu2
