Christian,
Yes, I have already conceded that we need a "master copy" ( reference text
).
My remarks were intended to combat the "ASCII is all things to all people"
attitude that seems to pervade these lists. It is not an argument against
the English language, as ASCII can be used for other languages, e.g. French
( albeit imperfectly - no accents, etc.) However, ASCII can not be used for
languages such as Arabic and Chinese; to say that it is easily
understandable by everyone is facile and narrow-minded.
Whether we want to do anything about it, is another question.
Regards,
Graham Travers
* - Email: graham(_dot_)travers(_at_)bt(_dot_)com
-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Huitema [SMTP:huitema(_at_)exchange(_dot_)microsoft(_dot_)com]
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 4:47 PM
To: graham.travers; Valdis.Kletnieks
Cc: doug; ietf
Subject: RE: HTML better for small PDAs
ASCII is NOT understandable by people who can't read and/or
speak languages which use the Latin alphabet. It is not
understandable by them now, and it was not understandable 40
years ago.
Uh? This is an argument against the english language, not an argument
againt the character set. If someone does not speak english, it matters
very little whether the document is presented as 55x72 fixed typeset
pages, Postscript, HTML, or XML. Indeed, we could also debate whether
the documents should be made available in other languages than english,
but the experience of organizations who do that , such as the UN, the
EU, and to some degree the ITU, teaches us that quite a few lessons.
First, this is a very expensive proposition; the IETF does not quite
have the resource of maintaining a corps of interpreters. Second,
translation is time consuming, and can be the cause of many publication
delays, which can be used in standard-process games. Third, as
translation is never a perfect bijection, there is a non-zero risk of
conflicting interpretations of the various language texts, and thus lack
of interoperability.
This is not to say that we should make efforts to have the IETF
protocols documented in many languages, for people to understand. But I
would rather draw a sharp separation between the reference text, for
which a single language and a spartan presentation are adequate, and the
educational material, which ought to be available in many languages,
forms and shapes.
-- Christian Huitema