But there is a teensy inconsistency in an argument that goes 'we must have plaintext for accessibility' then ignores the language and character set issues as unimportant. The real reason to change the RFC format is that the IETF needs to make a visible sign that it is capable of institutional change. A lot has happened in the past three years, there has been a significant turnover in IETF management. The old boys club (and it was mostly boys) has been largely broken up. The IAB and IESG are now subject to de-facto term limits. Institutions that do not constantly renew and re-invent themselves become obsolete. The IETF is a technology organization, if its communications tell the world that it is wedged in the 1960s it will be very difficult for it to be relevant in the modern Internet which has over a billion users. > -----Original Message----- > From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On > Behalf Of Dave Aronson (re IETF) > Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 8:20 AM > To: ietf@xxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: ASCII art > > JFC (Jefsey) Morfin [mailto:jefsey@xxxxxxxxxx] writes: > > > This is here where however we have a real practical > problem. Only > standards and procedures written in English > can be authoritative and > Drafts needs to be designed using > the ASCII charsets. This is > acceptable when only English > speaking engineers and reading users are > concerned. This > represents less than 1/4 of the world population. > > But the entire world population isn't all equally involved in > designing and running the Internet, or for that matter even > using it. (Egalitarians may claim they SHOULD be, but since > they AREN'T for now, and changing languages is IMHO extremely > unlikely to change that, we can ignore that for now.) > English is the "lingua franca" of the modern world, so to > speak. Therefore, to paraphrase Churchill, English is the > worst possible language for Internet protocol documentation, > except for all the others. > > -Dave > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > > _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf