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Re: Make HTML and PDF more prominent, was: Re: Why the normative form of IETF Standards is ASCII

2010-03-19 08:07:40
Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

1. I cannot print them correctly on either Windows or Mac.
2. I cannot view them at all on the mobile device
 
These two issues can easily be solved by using the PDF or HTML versions.

Simple plain ASCII text is just fine.

3. I cannot enter the name of an author correctly if that name
includes non-ASCII characters.

But even if you could, would you?

That's why non ASCII characters MUST NOT be used.

I can't do anything useful with names written in anything other than
latin characters (well, maybe also Greek).

Not merely Latin but pure ASCII and definitely NOT Greek.

Is the tiny benefit of having the "real" name there as a
non-normative extra really enough to change what we've been
doing for 40 years?

Not at all. But say it to people who are insisting to use Latin-1
diacritical marks for IETF ML discussions as if it were internationally
usable.

Correct interpretation of things like UTF-8 is highly dependent
on context. On many systems a plain text file with non-7bit-ASCII
characters won't be displayed as intended by default.

The problem is that UNICODE is broken that it does not carry
necessary context information, which was expected to be supplied
magically.

So it would
be necessary to go to HTML with &#; encodings of these characters
or PDF to be reasonably sure they show up correctly. To me, PDF is
unacceptable because it's even harder to display on devices other
than computers with large screens or paper and it can't be decoded
without complex tools. And switching to HTML just for this purpose
isn't worth it to me.

Just rely on ISO2022 and everything works just fine.

But then, I've never written a draft that
equired non-ASCII characters so that's easy for me to say.

I did write an RFC and drafts on how character encoding could have
been internationalized.

Moreover, for these 10 years, I have developped a simple and straight
forward theory on what, actually, is unification. I can elaborate, if
you are interested in.

                                                        Masataka Ohta

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