I have been unhappy with RFC-1345 for many years, primarily because it purports to be accurate about which letter is at which code point in which character set encoding (sadly the document isn't accurate in various details), which has misled some number of implementers through the years and caused avoidable interoperability problems, and because it claims to be "international", when actually it has a very strong bias towards northern European languages. Earlier John Klensin suggested: > If an offspring of 1345 were defined as having, e.g., only > European languages using Roman-derived scripts in scope, then > I think there is more than adequate expertise around to review > a proposal and sufficient stability to not be affected by Unicode > changes, and that there should be no significant issue with IETF > sign-off or even standardization. If that were undertaken, then think the charter (if any) and the document need to be made VERY clear that the scope is only *European* languages (e.g. explicitly excluding other Romanised languages such as Vietnamese Quoc Ngu [1,2]) -- and only those European languages that normally have a Romanised script (e.g. not including Cyrillic script European languages). As an example of why the scope needs to be narrowed that way, RFC-1456 defines the very widely used convention (VIQR) for expressing Quoc Ngu within the limitations of ISO-646/US-ASCII. RFC-1345 pretty much botches non-European languages that happen to be Romanised. This was raised as an issue with the author of RFC-1345 prior to publication, but the author frankly was not interested in hearing any non-European inputs. Folks who haven't been involved in multi-lingual computing might not realise quite what a minefield this whole area is. Approximately speaking, choices about how to represent glyphs/letters and how to encode them usually have some inherent linguistic bias. People who use languages that aren't optimally encoded in some representation tend not to be very happy with the non-optimal encodings their language might have been given. Yours, Ran rja@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [1] Chu Nom is approximately unused at this point. I only know of 1 book that has been printed with Chu Nom in my lifetime (obviously I might have missed some, but it is clear the volume of Chu Nom publications is remarkably low), and that one was careful also to include the Quoc Ngu form on adjacent pages so that non-scholars could read it. Folks who can read Chinese and are interested in linguistics might find that book interesting; I'm not sure how many more would. [2] http://www.nomfoundation.org _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf