Re: Why the normative form of IETF Standards is ASCII

Hi,

(ah, flamewars! My favourite! :-) )
> Can't you notice fancy tool of you have wrongly translated a
> character in "univerval. ?Any" of quoted message, even though
> the original message by Martin Rex is pure ASCII.
>
> That is, two consequetive space characters "  " before "Any" is
> translated to a space character and something else, which is not
> legible to me.
>   
The converted message displayed perfectly for me (no question mark, but
a non-breaking-space). That is because I use a standards-compliant mail
reader which

a) figured that the message encoding for Tim's message is ISO-8859-1
b) the character in question is listed in ISO-8859-1 as "NBSP"
c) consequently displayed a NBSP for me.

If your mail reader displayed something else, it is either misconfigured
or broken. Please do not use your misconfiguration or broken software as
an argument why using a beyond-ASCII character set is a bad thing in
itself. Instead, either configure your product of choice to respect the
advertised encoding, or complain to the vendor of your product of choice
to fix their software.

To get to the marginal correct point in your rant above: you may
consider it rude by Tim that he mis-quoted the original post, and did
some editing - even though the editing is not even visible. Whether or
not that alteration of the original text upsets you or not is entirely
your own thing, of course. It doesn't contribute very much to the
discussion on character sets for RFC documents though.

> You have successfully demostrated that, beyond ASCII, even the
> simplest character handling is impossible.
>   
No, you have successfully demonstrated that the webmailer you are using
is doing a bad job. (And I can easily say that in this case, because for
an NBSP there is not possibly an excuse "But I don't have a font which
would contain this character" - NBSPs are a standard feature of every
web page, and a webmailer in particular needs to know how to handle that )

> Before saying something about long history of confusions and frauds
> on  internationalization, please don't convert someone else's pure
> ASCII message into something else.
>   
Conversions happen daily in countless formats. Your mail has been
archived in the IETF's mailing list archive for ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org, and 
will
be displayed, behold, on a *web page*. Fancy HTML tags around it.
different font sizes for the headline. Does that upset you? If yes: even
the IETF web archive does a better job at displaying your mail than your
mail agent of choice. If you visit the following link, you'll see Tim's
message on the IETF web archives. Note the perfectly rendered "space"
instead of a question mark.

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg60578.html

(if you still see the ? instead, read above paragraph about
misconfigured or broken software)

Greetings,

Stefan Winter

-- 
Stefan WINTER
Ingenieur de Recherche
Fondation RESTENA - Réseau Téléinformatique de l'Education Nationale et de la 
Recherche
6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
L-1359 Luxembourg

Tel: +352 424409 1
Fax: +352 422473

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