Re: I-D file formats and internationalization

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On Dec 1, 2005, at 8:34 AM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
The suggestion of the HTML escape would ensure readability.

Fully disagree. Listing an author as Patrik Fältström is not "readable".

The suggestion was for an alternate field in the XML input file to contain non-ASCII versions of authors and titles of references used to augment the ASCII version when the output form allows. The idea of a escape mechanism was to allow the definition of non-ASCII characters elsewhere as perhaps could be needed to clarify protocol related issues.

It
would allow an alternative display that remains compatible with an ASCII
limitation as the authoritative version.

It would mix escaped HTML into text/plain documents. It would also make RFCs that talk about HTML extremely difficult to read, because the reader would not know if entities in examples are supposed to be the escaped or unescaped versions.

This would require a convention with respect to what gets converted. How often are numeric HTML Unicode characters used? If this appears to be problematic, then simply retain the escape sequence in all output forms.


UTF-8 use would require
additional considerations regarding searching however.

Please list those; they would be valuable for the Internet Draft.

You talk about some of the issues in your draft. Even when just ASCII is used, there is difficulty discerning differences between characters, where one's ability is largely determined by familiarity with a particular font style. Cyrillic could be an example of there being more than one character-repertoire that may be used. Going from 94+ characters to thousands is obviously more of a challenge for those wishing to pose a search.

Perhaps within a few years, as Unicode becomes more ubiquitous and such issues have been resolved with better tools, resistance against full adoption may be less. In my view, the place to start would be with the ID and alternative output forms, and not the ASCII RFC. It seems regimenting where exceptions are allowed makes sense, where an authoritative ASCII document is retained for now. At some point in time, you will be right.

-Doug

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