The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Unicode Format for Network Interchange ' <draft-klensin-net-utf8-09.txt> as a Proposed Standard This document has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an IETF Working Group. The IESG contact person is Chris Newman. A URL of this Internet-Draft is: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-klensin-net-utf8-09.txt Technical Summary The Internet today is in need of a standardized form for the transmission of internationalized "text" information, paralleling the specifications for the use of ASCII that date from the early days of the ARPANET. This document specifies that format, using UTF-8 with normalization and specific line-ending sequences. Working Group Summary This is the product of an individual submission but has been extensively reviewed and debated on the applications area discussion mailing list. Protocol Quality There appears to be strong list consensus to move from ASCII to UTF-8 for canonical text (reflecting continued support for BCP 18). There were no objections to the selected normalization form for Unicode. There was some debate about inclusion or exclusion of specific control codes, and some debate about the use of canonical CRLF line endings as is traditional in most IETF protocols vs. permitting multiple line endings as HTTP does. The design restriction to remain backwards compatible with traditional ASCII NVT as well as the goal to provide an interoperable interchange format (rather than a transfer protocol) informed the current design. The document acknowledges many participants who have reviewed the work and provided feedback. During IETF last call, two individuals expressed dissent about technical choices while supporting the basic goal of the document. The technical choices in question are the choice to make this an NVT superset for backwards compatibility with previous IETF specifications and the choice of a single canonical line ending. The responsible area director believes rough consensus supports this document as written based on positive support from the IETF list and the applications discuss list. Additional non-normative text was added to revision -08 to further justify the latter decision. This was reviewed for the IESG by Chris Newman. _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
