At 12:25 PM 9/25/2001, Stephen Casner wrote:
She thanked me for my suggestion, but seemed not to be interested in
my offer to supply the format checking program.
hmmm. would not be difficult to have a "submit this file as an I-D" web
page, which would do the checking automatically and forward the file to the
I-D czar. If it became popular, I suspect they would be glad to have it
work from the I-D page.
I have a couple of questions regarding format policy:
- Are unpaginated drafts acceptable? I think they probably should
be (and have been accepted in the past) because I-D's are supposed
Strongly agree.
to serve for quick proposals as well as finished documents. But
if a draft does contain pagination, then it should be limited to
58 lines as in the I-D guidelines and RFC 2223.
yes.
- Is it accurate that I-D's and RFCs are supposed to contain only
the US-ASCII (7-bit) character set? Or are we supposed to allow
for ISO-Latin-1 characters in people's names, etc.? I thought I
saw a document somewhere that answered this question (and said
US-ASCII only), but RFC 2223 only says "The character codes are
ASCII" which may not be specific enough.
There are many unprintable characters that are, nonetheless, US-ASCII. We
probably need to be more precise about legal/illegal.
Equally, it is clear that the strongly international quality to the IETF
requires permitting at least SOME encoding of non-ASCII. As you note, at
least being able to encode a person's name properly would seem more than
appropriate.
The difficulty with
allowing anything other than US-ASCII is that there is no place
for a character set indication to go (this normally is placed in a
MIME header, for example, and there is none on a plain text
document).
Well, actually, we do have some techniques available, for inline encoding
of brief strings. They are ugly, but they work.
d/
----------
Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
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