Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
Too many WGs have made the mistake in thinking that their consensus
would be acceptable to the wider community, or could be made acceptable
without major changes. More WGs need to find out what is acceptable to
the wider community long before they go to Last Call.
On top of that, the current consensus, such as it is within USEFOR, is a
consensus of exhaustion, and somewhat marginal even at that. It's been
years, we still don't have any sort of base document, and arguments like
this one have driven many people off of the mailing list entirely.
I've personally just ran out of energy to argue about the right way to do
non-ASCII newsgroup names. There's some huge amount of complexity that's
going to get shoved somewhere, and there are fewer gateways than there are
news clients or news servers, so I suppose it makes some sense to shove
the complexity there. It seems unlikely to me that the current approach
is going to actually work that well, but I ran out of anything better to
offer that's not unacceptable to some other group of people.
I never understood what was wrong with RFC 2047 encoding, at least for
everything except the Newsgroups header (which poses some special
challenges), but many other people on USEFOR seem to feel that it would be
a catastrophically bad decision, and as I only speak English, I don't feel
particularly well-qualified to comment.
The majority of folks on USEFOR also seem to me to have bought
wholeheartedly into the concept of Unicode and the belief that Unicode
will displace all other character sets in the near future, that all
software will soon expect any untagged 8-bit data to be in Unicode, and
that handling Unicode is all that's necessary to move forward into the
non-ASCII world. I part company some on that point; these days, Unicode
looks to me a lot more like IPv6, namely a better technical concept that
may eventually get quietly deployed but that isn't going to change the
world any time soon.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>