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Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 16:55:44
Martin Rex wrote:
Some more thoughts about this:

As long as the IETF want to continue publishing standards in the one
single language "English", it should restrict the character sets in
the texts (and the examples) to ASCII.

Text? Yes. Examples? Contact info? No.

non-ASCII letters are a royal PITA in so many ways, that they should
not be used.

Disagreed.

Finding a Postscript printer driver that prints umlauts is
extremely difficult (I know, I'm German and I can't get PDFs printing
properly with Umlauts).  Similarly, quite a lot of screen fonts do
not contain Umlauts.  And although my software is configured to
work with iso-8859-1, it is unable to display cyrillic and greek
characters.

I have never had problems printing PDFs with umlauts.

And while I'm German and have keys for umlauts on my keyboard,
I have serious difficulties to create other funny characters
from the iso-8859-1 character set (like some skandinavian),
let alone greek, cyrillic or any symbols from asian languagues.

That's a totally orthogonal issue.

I can not recognize, name or type any of the symbols from
asian languages, and I can neither print or display them,
nor input them on my keyboard.  Which makes it completely
impossible to search for them or discuss them.

I'm pretty sure that you can display and print at least some of them with a recent browser and operating system.

Really, I see no justification why they should be part of an
IETF specification, if they're only marginally useful to a (smaller) fraction of the consumers of IETF specs and fairly
hostile and unusable to the rest.

Non-ASCII characters in I18N examples would be useful to *any* reader. Keep in mind that a consumer of an IETF spec will be able to read English, thus understand the Latin alphabet, and thus be able to understand the difference between, for instance, an "e" and an "é".

If the IETF want so allow umlauts, it will have to allow all
of Unicode, and that would become close to a catastrophe.

I would support allowing all of Unicode for contact information (as long as an ASCII substitute text is available), and a subset for examples.

 90.0% of the software *I* use is capable of ISO-8859-1,
  9.9% is pure-ASCII
  0.1% is capable to do more than that (not necessarily
       full unicode)

Any HTML4 user agent supports Unicode (and no, that doesn't mean it will have fonts to display all of it).

Actually, most of the common fixed sized fonts seem to
contain only ASCII characters (and fixed size fonts happen
to be the fonts that I use mostly).
> ...

BR, Julian
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