All,
Let's consider a few basic principles.
1. Neither ASCII nor XML are ever displayed. They are CODES for
representing characters in a computer. It is the CHARACTERS ( glyphs ) that
are displayed ( presented / rendered ). There is a mapping between the codes
and the glyphs.
2. ASCII has a strictly limited set of characters and glyphs ( even the
"international" version ), which can not represent many languages in the
world, and does a poor job of rendering diagrams, pictures, etc.
3. As some people have emphasised, the importance of ASCII lies in the (
American Standard Code for Information ) INTERCHANGE. Interchange implies
the ability to transfer in a manner which can be understood by both parties
to the transfer. The MOST COMMON global method of transferring will be the
most effective.
4. Interchange does not guarantee understanding - either of presentation
format or content. I wouldn't like to have to deal with Einstein's Theory
of Relativity ( content ), especially in Chinese ( format ). ASCII does not
interchange Chinese characters, so it's presentation format is NOT readily
understandable by "most people".
5. A more comprehensive coding scheme, such as the Universal Character Set
( ISO 10646 ) would allow many more characters and glyphs to be used.
6. The key to usage of encoding schemes is how widely they can be
interpreted by character presentation ( or rendering ) applications ( word
processors, etc. ), in mapping the internal codes to the glyphs rendered on
the screen or on paper. Applications which can render more characters would
allow the use of larger code ranges and more characters.
Until something replaces ASCII as the most commonly available global
interchange format ( and could it be HTML / XML ? ), it will remain the
default. That doesn't mean that we should just accept it for evermore. If
that principle were followed, we would still be drawing on cave walls and
large red rock formations ( Ayres in Australia ! ), which are not very
transportable !
One of the things that the IETF could, and in my opinion SHOULD, do it to
make its documents available in several presentation formats, not to say
languages. Yes, we would still need a master copy and format, which could
be ASCII, but other, more presentable formats, would make life easier for
many people. The ITU-T ( I'm sorry to mention it, but they have been doing
this for decades ) publishes its documents in three languages. If the IETF
is really working for the world, it should take a more global view and
consider a similar sort of policy. Don't we have a work stream on
internationalisation ?
Of course, this sort of effort costs money - lots of it. That's why the
ITU-T charges for documents. If you want it free, you take the IETF
approach and get the inexpensive, ASCII, American language version.
Regards,
Graham Travers
* - Email: graham(_dot_)travers(_at_)bt(_dot_)com
-----Original Message-----
From: Jorge Amodio [SMTP:jamodio(_at_)verio(_dot_)net]
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 6:34 AM
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Why XML is perferable
Wang Xianzhu wrote:
to render XML documents to pure text presentation. There will be
^^^^^^^
converters from XML to HTML, ms word, ps, pdf and any other types of
presentation, suitable for any type of readers.
Meanwhile I stick with ASCII, which I can grep, cut & paste.
Also I don't think it will be at all practical to drive email
discussions
for ietf drafts if we have to start using XML/HTML/SGML/*ML crap.
BTW, there are RFCs (1125, 1129, etc.) only available in ps format, and
some
provided both text and ps versions. ASCII text is not enough to
describe
information.
Well it worked fine for 2800+ documents and how many today ?
implementations
of tcp/ip protocols running on how many devices ?
I wonder if anyone can write a readable pure text version of ITU-T
P.861.
What P.861 {Objective quality measurement of telephone-band (300-3400
Hz)
speech codecs} has to do with tcp/ip and rfc's ???
BTW, I hate to pay for ITU documents what are supposed to be public (I
still
remember the years old discussion when they ceased to exist available
for anon ftp)
Regards
Jorge.