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Re: Why the normative form of IETF Standards is ASCII

2010-03-19 18:45:41
Julian Reschke wrote:

I don't buy that. We've got something like 1 billion people on the 
planet running web browsers, and I'm pretty confident we can find a few 
non-ASCII characters everybody can display which could be used in examples.

What exactly is the purpose of "a few non-ASCII characters everybody can
display"?  And while the environments that I use are mostly capable
to display ISO-Latin-1, I do _NOT_ know names for the majority of symbols
from > 128, and would have severe difficulties discussing stuff with
such symbols in speech, like in-person, at a bar, over lunch or on the
phone, and therefore don't want to have any of them in RFCs.

Discussing non-ASCII characters often requires the use of
unicode codepoints to avoid ambiguities and the lack of familiarity
of most people of this planet with the glyphs on most unicode codepoints.

Describing a unicode codepoint by its numeric value with characters from
IA5/US-ASCII, on the other hand, is fairly simple and straightforward.


-Martin
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