Am I wrong to think that UTF8 should be THE standard? I believe it can encode anything encoded by other encodings.
All the UTF-* encodings can encode the same code points. There are different trade offs though.
Can't we consider non-utf8 text as "legacy"? I don't like that word, but I do think it is the right way to go for text. If you know your text has a diferent encoding, just use 'iconv' to convert it, or a special Haskell library for conversion.
The important thing (I think) is to have an abstract concept that encompasses all the necessary characters (i.e. Unicode) and then a few well specified encodings with different trade offs. A Unicode Haskell library should handle at least a few of them (and more importantly keep track of the encoding.) -- Johan