Well, it's true that the Nuit spec intentionally ignores encoding issues, and thus a Nuit parser/serializer might need to understand encoding in addition to the Nuit spec. I don't see a problem with that.
The Arc implementation of Nuit basically just ignores encoding issues because Racket already takes care of all that. So any encoding information in the Nuit spec would have just been a nuisance.
There's already plenty of information out there about different Unicode encodings, so people can just use that if they don't have the luxury of relying on a system like Racket.
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I see encoding as having to do with the storage and transportation of text, which is certainly important, but it's beyond the scope of Nuit.
Perhaps a Nuit serializer wants to use ASCII because the system it's communicating with doesn't support Unicode. It could then use Punycode encoding.
Or perhaps the Nuit document contains lots of Asian symbols (Japanese, Chinese, etc.) and so the serializer wants to use an encoding that is better (faster or smaller) for those languages.
Or perhaps it's transmitting over HTTP in which case it must use CR+LF line endings and will probably want to use UTF-8.
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I'll note that Nuit also doesn't specify much about line endings. It says that the parser must convert line endings to U+000A but it doesn't say what to do when serializing.
If serializing to a file on Windows, the serializer probably wants to use CR+LF. If on Linux it would want to use LF. If transmitting over HTTP it must use CR+LF, etc.
Nuit also doesn't specify endianness, or whether a list should map to an array or a vector, or how big a byte should be, or whether the computer system is digital/analog/quantum, or or or...
Nuit shouldn't even be worrying about such things. Nuit shouldn't have to specify every tiny miniscule detail of how to accomplish things.
They are implementation details, which should be handled by the parsers/serializers on a case-by-case basis, in the way that seems best to them.
