I've noticed that the recent debate on the ASCII text format has often
conflated formatting of artwork and Unicode support. I think finding a
non-text artwork format that has free uniform authoring (including
diffs) and viewer support will be impossible for the next 5-10 years.
An XML equivalent to Postscript may eventually be widely implemented.
The current effort, SVG, is a massive specification, unevenly
implemented, and lacks a thorough test suite.
Unicode support is a different matter. I find the current IETF policy
to be incredibly bigoted. Many RFCs and I-Ds are currently forced to
misspell the names of authors and contributors, which doesn't seem
like correct attribution to me. So, I recommend that the IETF
secretariat and the RFC Editor change their policies to allow UTF-8
text files. That way, older RFCs and I-Ds produced using the current
tools would follow the same encoding.
I'm sure someone has already suggested this approach, but I'll add my
voice to the chorus.
Robert Sayre
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