Dave Cridland wrote:
The IAB made a clear statement that we need i18n support, yet over a
decade after RFC 2130 or RFC 2825, the RFCs themselves still have a
strict ASCII limitation. Sure, that wasn't mentioned at the time, but
does nobody else find this plain shameful?
You taking this completely out-of-context.
rfc2825 says this:
... providing all users of the Internet with the capability of
using their own language and its standard character set to
express themselves, write names, ...
So what it says is that all users should be able to write names
in *THEIR* language. This means that e.g. a japanese should be able
to write text, their names and everyone elses names in japanese
using _only_ graphical kanji characters.
Since we are writing RFCs in the _english_language_, so that they
can be consumed by the widest possible audience, _all_ text in them
ought to be written in the english language. The agreed upon
character set to represent the english language in RFCs and I-Ds is
called "International Alphabet 5" or "US-ASCII".
Authors from some of the asian languages need to provide their name
spelled with letters from the IA5String alphabet, and so are authors
from european countries using one of the iso8859-n alphabets.
And if we should change anything about the Author's Address section,
then it would be to replace the contact information with URLs
to an IETF web server where each author can update/maintain his
contact information.
If HTML is used to provide that information, then authors could provide
their name in their own language and using their own character set
(Arabic,Hanzi,Hebrew,Kanji,ISO-Latin-X,whathaveyou) in addition
to the US-ASCII representation -- and that would be a I18N use
in the sense of rfc2825.
Interop problems are frequently when people try to communicate
with speech and have strong accents (caused by the difference in
vocal sounds between their mother language and the language they
try to communicate in).
Artificially creating interop problems in written language,
by inserting arbitrary characters from foreign languages
into a communication, seems like a very bad idea.
-Martin
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