As usual, the discussion of "ASCII plain text versus beyond-ASCII plain
text" has been mixed up with the essentially unrelated discussion of
"plain text versus another format."
Martin Rex <mrex at sap dot com> wrote:
Unicode characters are also a Royal PITA in specs, because they're
non-discussable. There are extremely few people who can recognize all
unicode codepoints from their glyphs (and a number of them can not be
distinguished by their glyphs), and even worse, most
machines/environments do not even have fonts to display glyphs for
most of the unicode codepoints.
The fact that Latin A and Cyrillic А and Greek Α look the same is not a
reason to stick with only 95 printable characters. RFCs are not
spoofing targets.
The fact that most systems cannot display "most of the unicode
codepoints" is irrelevant, because most English-language texts (like
RFCs) use only characters in a small and well-known fraction of the
Unicode code space. You might expect an RFC to contain non-ASCII
characters like á and — that are part of a well-known and widely used
subset like WGL4. You would not expect it to contain Egyptian
hieroglyphs or Vai syllables or domino tiles.
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s
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