ietf-822
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Re: Comments and extensions to STIF

1993-09-18 15:10:27
Greg, Dave:
I have unfortunately not had the time to look closely at STIF (perhaps
hoping that the relative quiet meant that it had died....)

I dislike the basic assumption made in STIF:

That it is appropriate to define an international format that:
- Is intended to be "nearly human readable"
- Imposes special syntax on Norwegian dat fields ([]), which means
  that you have to know when you start typing a line whether or not
  you need to put Norwegian characters in there
- Does not allow at all the use of Norwegian in tag names.
  (for instance, the Norwegian word for "birth" contains an O-slash).

I would much rather prefer to see an approach that either went all
the way towards being machine parseable (my preference: SGML....), or
went all the way towards being "special-looking text", such as the
Tab-separated-format that, I believe, supports a "charset" parameter.

                       Harald Tveit Alvestrand

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