On 11/30/05, Bob Braden <braden(_at_)isi(_dot_)edu> wrote:
This issue has been brought up before and has been on our list of
things to worry about for at least two years. But we always run
aground on the following consideration: there is a substantial
constituency for have some least-common-denominator form of IETF
documents, so people can read and print them with even the most
primitive, old-fashioned (unfashionable?) tools.
I agree that basic console tools should be all that's required to view
the documents. That said, the current format is not easy to print with
proper pagination on Microsoft Windows, so it is not perfect (as you
know). I would characterize the current situation this way:
"Some author names and Unicode protocol parameters are garbled for all
viewers."
I think it's reasonable to shoot for
"Some author names and Unicode protocol parameters are garbled for
some viewers."
Allowing extended
character sets for author names seems like a really nice idea to
the RFC Editor as well, but we see no way to do that and keep the
LCD.
Hmm. What is the LCD? Is it NetBSD circa 1993? Is it a PDP-11? At what
point does internationalization trump (vociferous?) users of long
obsolete platforms?
You need some kind of structured document that some people
won't have the tools to display, search, print, ... The
RFC Editor would welcome a way out of this dilemma.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/quickbrown.txt
So, which viewing tools fall over on that text file and need to be
supported? I just tried it in Emacs, where most of the languages
displayed correctly (I don't have East Asian fonts, so I got some
squares), and Firefox displayed all of it correctly.
--
Robert Sayre
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
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