At 09:42 AM 9/3/98 -0700, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
A note to the editors: I found a problem relating to this in reading the
-07 draft. In 5.2.3.22, you say "in human-readable form (UTF-8)". UTF-8 is
not human-readable unless every character in the text is US-ASCII. During
IESG last cally, you should probably strike "in human-readable form" from
this section.
Ummm, I'm not sure I understand. My reading of printing UTF-8 in human
readable form means that you should apply whatever print transform is
needed to make it look like text. It's just as applicable to ASCII as UTF-8
(and in fact that text dates from the days when the spec said ASCII). For
example, 0x4a6f6e407067702e636f6d is the ASCII representation of my return
mail address, but it's less human readable than "Jon(_at_)pgp(_dot_)com" is. If
I put
on my spec-lawyer hat and strike "in human-readble form" then it's
acceptable to put the UTF-8 out in hex or ISO-Latin5, even. "Human-readable
form" means to me that you put the bits through whatever transform makes
the right glyphs come out, and that's precisely what we want; it's an
admonition not to eat the daisies. But I'll strike it if that's what gets
us passed.
Kazu, does the wording on the "Charset:" header help you? Putting a tag in
there to specify language is something simple that the implementor can do
to solve this problem. The only other place where there is text is in the
user id packets, and those are defined to have essentially no format. By
convention they are RFC822 names, but they can be X.500 names or anything
else. It's reasonable to qualify a name with a RFC1766 language tag there
if you don't want to use romaji.
I'm willing to put something quick in for IETF last call if it will solve
the problem. I'm willing to say, "we do it the way they do it" for some
suitable they. But I don't want to stop progress.
Jon
-----
Jon Callas jon(_at_)pgp(_dot_)com
CTO, Total Network Security 3965 Freedom Circle
Network Associates, Inc. Santa Clara, CA 95054
(408) 346-5860
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