Hi,
You're heading into new territory, here. Right now
IETF documents are written in English and they're
If you allow a bit of nitpicking here: they cannot be written in all the
labels the English language has to offer, and thus they can only be
written in a *subset* of English. So a devil's advocate (which I
absolutely don't mind playing here) could say that the restriction to
ASCII *prevents* expressing oneself in the full bouquet of English
language; unfortunately, English language is mandatory for IETF
documents. So, staying with ASCII would require a reformulation for IETF
language from
"English"
to
"English words which can be expressed in ASCII encoding"
Example?
"Naïve" is a perfectly valid English word. (If your mail reader doesn't
display this correctly: that's an i with two dots on top instead of one)
Likewise is "coup d'état" an English word (e with accent). All loan
words from French, but nontheless English words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_d%27Etat
At least the first one has been used in an I-D from the IAB very
recently
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-idn-encoding-00.txt). It
used the alternative spelling with a normal i; the other spelling was
obviously impossible for the reasons we are discussing in (parts of)
this thread. Maybe the author wanted to use that alternative spelling
anyway, but maybe he was forced to use it even though it hurt his eye
and he is now drowning in grief over the butchering of language he was
forced to execute in order to publish his work. We will never know for
sure; unless of course the author tells us about his feelings on this
list :-)
Let's give ASCII its long-overdue coup de grâce (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_de_grace ).
Greetings,
Stefan Winter
displayable on a wider variety of hardware than HTML
is. As I mentioned in the mail to which you're responding,
I think the choice of formats tends to support more
openness and accessibility. I think you're implicitly
arguing that that's not the right tradeoff, and frankly
I think it's exactly the right tradeoff, myself.
Melinda
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Stefan WINTER
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