--On Monday, 25 August, 2008 15:56 -0700 Tim Bray
<tbray(_at_)textuality(_dot_)com> wrote:
Pardon my reverse-parochialism, but I think the need to be
able to spell editors' and contributors' names correctly, and
give examples of messages containing payloads which are not
expressible in 7-bit characters, dwarfs in importance the need
to decorate RFCs with pictures. -Tim
Tim,
The requirement you are stating morphs into the "RFCs in UTF-8
issue". It is actually a different issue than the image one, in
the sense that, if one could have textual RFCs in UTF-8 (or some
other Unicode flavor), then one would still have the image
problem (which is not really about pictures or decoration but
about being able to express flows, relationships, and similar
diagrams in a clear and concise way.
I see some fairly significant problems with most of the "RFCs in
UTF-8" or equivalent proposals I have seen, many of them having
to do with environments in which UTF-8 is not as ubiquitous as
one might like to believe. But I don't any point in trying to
discuss or critique such proposals until there is one... and
"proposal" in the IETF continues to mean "write an I-D", not
"sketch an idea on a mailing list" or "express outrage that
something isn't possible/ permitted".
In the meantime, we put this particular proposal together
because it seemed useful, seemed like a plausible solution to a
known and clearly-identified problem, and seemed like something
on which we might be able to get consensus on the general idea
and then refine the details (unlike more radical proposals to
change the ways in which RFCs were published and archived, which
have always ended up in rat holes or worse). If, instead,
people want to argue that nothing at all should be done until
they get their particular preferred "most important" change...
well, I can't prevent you or them from doing that and wouldn't
try, but you will forgive me if I don't believe it is
constructive.
john
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