--On Tuesday, 06 November, 2007 21:18 -0600 Spencer Dawkins <spencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I have been selected as the General Area Review Team (Gen-ART) > reviewer for this draft (for background on Gen-ART, please see > http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/art/gen-art-FAQ.html). > > Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call > comments > you may receive. > > Document: draft-klensin-unicode-escapes-06.txt > Reviewer: Spencer Dawkins > Review Date: 2007-11-08 > IETF LC End Date: 2007-11-15 > IESG Telechat date: > > Summary: This document is ready for publication as a BCP, with > one question and one comment for the sponsoring AD. I should > also mention that the document is very clear and well-written. > > Comments: This document uses a fair amount of SHOULD/SHOULD > NOT language without a lot of explanation about why the > SHOULDs are not MUSTs. I'm not sure what's appropriate for an > APPS-area BCP, but I usually ask about SHOULD/SHOULD NOT > without guidance. > > This is a BCP that recommends two different encoding escapes. > If the SHOULDs are something like "MUST unless you're using > the other method", is 2119 language even needed? That is a good question. Some small part of that language is the result of the evolution of this document from one strong recommendation, to no recommendation at all, to a pair of alternative recommendations, neither of which was the original one. (So much for the theory that individual submissions don't change during IETF discussion.) I'd be happy to change it to "you MUST use one or the other" if that is what the community prefers, but there actually are reasons for the weaker language: there are probably protocols that are closely tied to a particular programming language or existing protocol that would be better off following their practices than these recommendations. One example that came up in the discussions involved IRIs. URIs use escaped (hexified) UTF-8, which, as you probably inferred from the document, is one of my least favorite choices. IRIs stayed with that convention to keep things from becoming even worse as the two types of escapes got confused. I personally think that may have been the wrong choice, but my belief is part of a more general impression that IRIs didn't go nearly far enough in the direction of internationalization to be really useful. And, since we seem to be trapped in that direction, I suspect there can be a strong case made that some future protocol that builds in IRIs and URIs should follow the same path... hence SHOULD. I didn't discuss those exception cases in the draft for two reasons. First, no one before this has asked for that discussion. Second, I find most of the cases I've been able to think of, including the one above, to be distasteful and didn't want to explain them in a way that would give those who like them better than I do an excuse and rationale. best, john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf