On Jul 13, 1:36pm, Keld J|rn Simonsen wrote:
% Well, neither a) nor b). But I think that Europeans and Americans have
% different needs and thus priorities, and also that the Americans in
% the case of IETF has more to say than the Europeans. Anyway I want
% to have a truly international point of view, accomodating as much
% of the world as possible. Maybe I am too ambitious. To me it is a matter
% of good design and engineering, and I have tried to follow that myself
% by producing such specifications that should be able to scale to
% accomodate the world. That should keep us all from producing and reading
% 1000's of pages of email until we join planets from other galaxes.
Keld is very mistaken indeed if he thinks that he has the monopoly
on the European needs or that the "Americans" like me are not
sensitive to European (not to mention Asian) concerns. I also think
that the needs and priorities of users are much more alike than
different -- based on experience living and working in Europe and the
US and E/SE Asia. There really isn't much area that conflicts.
The people on this list are all sensitive to those concerns and most
of us are multilingual and are trying to develop a standard that meets
not only American needs, not only European needs, but in fact the
needs of ALL languages and potential users.
The comments from Keld that I've received in email such as "The
people on the IETF are not knowledgable about character set issues."
are neither true nor productive. There needs to be more of a
cooperative spirit and less hostile "us Europeans versus them
Americans" if we are to develop a useful spec.
I'm sorry to put this out in public, but my frustration with being
told in email (on and off-list) that I am ignorant and insensitive to
European concerns when none of these are very true has boiled over
today.