Re: ASCII art

You can not have two authoritative texts. Yes I understand that it may
happen (probably already did) that RFC text is translation from original 
written in another language. The reason it got translated however is so 
that it could be checked on and commented by IETF community and so that
it could go through IETF process for publication and the reason English 
is used is that IETF participants that review documents read English.
That English text then becomes authoritative because it had gone through 
entire review process where as text in another language would not have
been commented on (its not only substance but sometimes actual words
in text that is important in standard documents). The original in another 
language after publication can then be considered author's own personal 
translation to that language, which is although very helpful for those 
speaking that language, could not be considered authoritative because 
text has not gone through full IETF review.
The best that could be made with your ideas is possibly to ask rfc-editor 
to maintain list & links to unofficial translations for RFCs when existence
of such translations is reported to them as well as info on unofficial 
text of the RFC in some other format (i.e. XML). I think in such a case 
RFC editor should maintain only a link to external site (author or 
translator's own site) to emphasize the unofficial nature of such texts, 
but doing it as "caching copy" (like google does for pages) maybe ok too 
just so its available if link can not be reached, All this would require 
effort (for programming and for maintenance) and probably needs certain 
amount of agreement and desire from IETF participants to make it happen.
And as far as extra links for diagrams (for those with other languages)
if somebody creates a translation, his text can obviously use different 
link for language-specific diagram (and so can XML source or HTML text
of the document to the picture that can be used in place of ASCII art)
and to me it seems the right way to go about it.

On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:

> At 12:19 23/11/2005, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 09:54:27AM +0100,
> >  Julien(_dot_)Maisonneuve(_at_)alcatel(_dot_)com 
> > <Julien(_dot_)Maisonneuve(_at_)alcatel(_dot_)com> wrote
> >  a message of 25 lines which said:
> > > The IETF is probably the ONLY meaningful organisation in the world
> > > that insists on using ascii-only specifications. Any rationalization
> > > of that practise should try to explain why we are so exceptional
> > So, saying "Everybody do it that way, we should, too" is ignoring many
> > IETF idiosyncrasies.
> Full agreement.
>
> > 3) IETF attendance is quite open (here, IETF is really exceptional). So, 
> > its members are a wide and diverse community and it is difficult to find a 
> > format which is both better than ASCII and widely available.
> This is here where however we have a real practical problem. Only standards 
> and procedures written in English can be authoritative and Drafts needs to 
> be designed using the ASCII charsets. This is acceptable when only English 
> speaking engineers and reading users are concerned. This represents less 
> than 1/4 of the world population. As long as the IETF addressed pure 
> Internet technology, it was unlikely this would be a problem - and after all 
> an ASCII technology can legitimately only documented in ASCII. This is not 
> anymore the case with the increase of societal aspects in the digital 
> ecosystem convergence and with multilingual issues.
> The BCP 49 update the IESG has approved, and I oppose in its current form 
> for that reason, creates and is unable to address that difficulty. As a BCP 
> it is supposed to document practices which - by essence - can be 
> increasingly authoritatively multilaterally documented in the concerned 
> languages (the translation is not from an authoritative English text to 
> another language, but from another language authoritative text to ASCII 
> English). RFC 3066 bis engages the IETF in having to be unilaterally 
> authoritative in areas where it has no internal expertise (and therefore no 
> cross-expertise), no adequate tools and procedures and no proper resources 
> (IANA is not multilingual - or even internationalized).
> This is why after more drastic initial suggestions, I found the sole (IMHO) 
> possible consensual technical proposition: it is to simply include in RFC 
> 3066 bis a hook (two lines of additional texte) to the RFC 4151 format 
> (URI-tags). This way, ASCII (and proposed RFC 3066 constrained format) stays 
> authoritative by default, but an external tagging system or procedure 
> (whatever the script) can be authoritatively referred to in an RFC, an XML 
> page or through a library entry, in using ASCII characters. Obviously, 
> upgrading RFC 4151 towards full IRI-tags support would be better. This 
> approach does not address everything, but it addresses most (including 
> protection of the users against simple racial/cultural/religious profiling 
> meta-spam [searches in Google through language tags the author might ignore 
> (RFC 3066 bis Security considerations) em] and language identification 
> encryption).
> Otherwise, after being quite open, as you mention it, the IETF will become 
> exceptional in our world of increasingly protected and respected cultural 
> diversity, as being culturally/societally exclusive and the authoritative 
> reference (language IANA registry) of that exclusion. I doubt this is the 
> intent, however this is/would be the practice.
> jfc
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