--On Monday, 21 November, 2005 11:16 -0800 "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I think that a better case to make wrt internationalization is > that it is hard to see how a pure ASCII document is ever > going to provide a satisfactory description of a protocol that > is based on unicode. This is an entirely different issue from the one that I think Jefsey was raising and Tom was responding to. Conflating them gets us nowhere at all. With regard to the "protocol based on Unicode" issue, first, the IETF has very little experience so far with such protocols. "Based on Unicode", to me, is a different situation from "being able to transmit Unicode". The latter can be easily described in a pure ASCII document, even though illustrative examples "in Unicode" might make things more clear. The comments below could, in principle, change as IETF experience accumulates although, personally, I'd be a little surprised. Suppose one had a protocol that was actually "based on Unicode". Issues with look-alike characters, font variations, and variations in coding and compression (normalization issues, UTF-8 versus UTC-2 versus UTC-4 and potentially other variations), etc., would nearly force characters to be identified in code point terms, e.g., as U+NNNN, rather than, or in addition to, just showing the characters in some preferred font. It is worth noting that the textual parts of the Unicode standard itself are written in just that way. So, again, the non-ASCII text becomes an extremely useful illustration of what is going on or part of illustrative examples or tables. The text may be easier to follow if those illustrations are present than if it is not, but everything normative can still be expressed in ASCII. And that takes us back to Paul's original comment, at least as I understood it -- the important thing is the quality of the writing. Access to fancy formatting and presentation tools may make good writing easier to follow and, in particular, to let the reader get the gist of what is going on before trying to deeply study the text. But adding fancy formatting and presentation to poor writing will, at best, only hide, for a while, the fact that the explanations are inadequate. And, by not forcing the extra discipline that writing without a dependence on clever illustrations requires, it may make it more likely that we will get documents whose inadequacies are harder to detect. As I said, that conclusion could change as experience with "protocols based on Unicode" expands. But, so far, we have almost no experience along that dimension (and, incidentally, neither do ISO or ITU or IEEE, at least as far as I know). john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf