> From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On > Behalf Of Robert Sayre > > Unicode support is a different matter. I find the current > IETF policy to be incredibly bigoted. Many RFCs and I-Ds are > currently forced to misspell the names of authors and > contributors, which doesn't seem like correct attribution to > me. So, I recommend that the IETF secretariat and the RFC > Editor change their policies to allow UTF-8 text files. That > way, older RFCs and I-Ds produced using the current tools > would follow the same encoding. > > I'm sure someone has already suggested this approach, but > I'll add my voice to the chorus. It might seem odd to people whose names do fit in ASCII but there are a lot of people who care about this type of issue. In effect the message is sent out 'you do not really belong here', 'you are a second class citizen', 'the IETF is an American organization and the only people who really matter are going to be American'. The fact that Brian is English and lives in Zurich is irrelevant. People take their names very seriously and personally. It's a question of outreach. Having one meeting out of three held outside North America each year is not outreach, it is a holiday. I am currently at the W3C AC meeting. They are also involved in the ongoing 'internet governance' discussions but the W3C is involved a participant in the discussions while the IETF is one of the topics of the discussions. Needless to say it is better to be a participant than the topic. The W3C has avoided concern by being conspicuously international in its approach. The IETF has had the attitude 'this is the way we do things here, nobody asked you to like it'. So far 700 translations of W3C specifications have been made by volunteers. I don't know what the quality of the translations are, I would certainly be upset if one of my engineers used a translation as the basis for writing running code. But those translations are certainly used by academics to teach comp-sci courses in those languages and a large number of students who would have found it difficult to understand the material in translation have come to understand and use the specification. It is simply a fact of modern life that the ability to speak English well is an essential qualification for almost all forms of knowledge work, particularly at the research and elite levels. That does not mean that a group of mostly English speakers should also make good English an essential qualification at the apprentice and journeyman stages of learning the craft. Phill _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf