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Re: Make HTML and PDF more prominent, was: Re: Why the normative

2010-03-20 08:49:27
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.

In the real world it is common to find business cards that are printed on
two sides. One side has everything printed in the Latin alphabet for
an international audience, and the other side is printed in Japanese
or Russian or Arabic for a local audience.

If the IETF did adopt an XML format as the normative one for RFCs
it would be possible to have two versions of the author info section,
one with US-ASCII representation of names and addresses and the
other with Unicode representations of the same. When converting
to an HTML or PDF viewable representation, the US-ASCII form
could be chosen by default or perhaps the Unicode version could
be relegated to an appendix.

Artificially creating interop problems in written language,
by inserting arbitrary characters from foreign languages
into a communication, seems like a very bad idea.

However, making those more accurate forms available elsewhere
in the communication is a good idea. In the USA, a Japanese person
will present their business card to you with the English side up. But
in Japan, they present it with the Japanese side up. In all cases, the
card contains both representations.

--Michael Dillon
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