Hi, > What I hear in these discussions can get translated into a lot of "it > would be nice" and > little if any "it is essential that". > > Changes to existing procedures tend to get driven by "it is essential > that," which is my point. > A working group saying that > the existing format restrictions are severely hindering their work > would count for a lot here. I'll have a go at it (I am not a working group, but I hope you allow me to express my opinion anyway). Plain ASCII makes work on drafts which deal with internationalisation very hard. I have just uploaded a draft with an example second-level domain containing the German small u-Umlaut [U+00FC] as input to an algorithm. Sorry, in fact the draft did of course *not* contain the umlaut. I had to escape it with the [U+00FC]. Writing that impairs the readability and understandability of the example quite a bit since the input on "paper" is not the same as the actual input. This is, IMHO, "severely hindering" work. If merely expressing oneself *about* i18n problems properly is impossible, I'm not really surprised that internationalisation is perceived as hard and cumbersome. (It's hard and cumbersome enough without these restrictions already anyway.) Unicode is there for a while already and I think switching to any kind of format that supports international character sets is essential. Pick any format you like, as long as it allows people to express their problems and solutions without ugly hacks (read: as long as it supports the full set of Unicode - not just the first 127 characters). Greetings, Stefan Winter P.S.: "a2ps" never failed on me for producing 2-up, nicely framed and properly page-breaked printer output. -- Stefan WINTER Ingenieur de Recherche Fondation RESTENA - Réseau Téléinformatique de l'Education Nationale et de la Recherche 6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi L-1359 Luxembourg Tel: +352 424409 1 Fax: +352 422473 _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf