--On Thursday, 30 August, 2007 16:29 -0700 Ned Freed
<ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com> wrote:
Exactly so. To the extent RFC 1345 is problematic, it is
because its domain of applicability is quite limited. But
within that narrow domain it actually can perform a useful
function.
Agreed. And perhaps that suggests a way forward if people are
willing to do the work (from my point of view, your efforts and
Ben's would probably be most of what is needed; I'd be happy to
review and maybe make whatever small contributions I could).
And this only serves to point out that the reasoning behind
quite a few of the criticisms I've seen of RFC 1345 over the
years, including, I regret to say, Harald's latest outburst,
is on fairly shakey ground: Just because something doesn't
solve the general case of the problem (which at it happens is
almost certainly unsolvable) doesn't mean it cannot provide a
useful solution to a much narrower problem. The baby may not
be that large, but that's not sufficient justication for
tossing it with the bathwater.
The other serious issues with RFC 1345 are that it contains a
number of errors and is more than a little out of date. Of
course these could be corrected with a revision. However,
given the extremely hostile reception this document and
underlying approach continues to receive in the IETF, I see
little chance of these issues being corrected - I for one
would be happy to help work on an update which among other
things would need to make the scopy of applicability much
clearer, but I frankly don't have the energy to deal what I am
confident would be a major struggle to get the resulting
document through the process. So we're effectively stuck with
the current version, warts and all. More's the pity.
Maybe I am, for a change, a little more optimistic about this
than you are. While it was not the case a few years ago, I
think an increasingly large fraction of the community is coming
to understand the principle that i18n tools, such as Unicode,
are, in many or most cases, just tools to permit localization
while permitting an international base. Viewed in that light, a
set of code-mnemonics for a specific, identified, subset of
characters is reasonable and a core problem with 1345 is that it
attempts to be much too broad.
If an offspring of 1345 were defined as having, e.g., only
European languages using Roman-derived scripts in scope, then I
think there is more than adequate expertise around to review a
proposal and sufficient stability to not be affected by Unicode
changes, and that there should be no significant issue with IETF
sign-off or even standardization.
Just my opinion, obviously.
john
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