Stefan Winter wrote:
>
> 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.
Some more thoughts about this:
As long as the IETF want to continue publishing standards in the one
single language "English", it should restrict the character sets in
the texts (and the examples) to ASCII.
non-ASCII letters are a royal PITA in so many ways, that they should
not be used.
Finding a Postscript printer driver that prints umlauts is
extremely difficult (I know, I'm German and I can't get PDFs printing
properly with Umlauts). Similarly, quite a lot of screen fonts do
not contain Umlauts. And although my software is configured to
work with iso-8859-1, it is unable to display cyrillic and greek
characters.
And while I'm German and have keys for umlauts on my keyboard,
I have serious difficulties to create other funny characters
from the iso-8859-1 character set (like some skandinavian),
let alone greek, cyrillic or any symbols from asian languagues.
I can not recognize, name or type any of the symbols from
asian languages, and I can neither print or display them,
nor input them on my keyboard. Which makes it completely
impossible to search for them or discuss them.
Really, I see no justification why they should be part of an
IETF specification, if they're only marginally useful to a
(smaller) fraction of the consumers of IETF specs and fairly
hostile and unusable to the rest.
If the IETF want so allow umlauts, it will have to allow all
of Unicode, and that would become close to a catastrophe.
90.0% of the software *I* use is capable of ISO-8859-1,
9.9% is pure-ASCII
0.1% is capable to do more than that (not necessarily
full unicode)
Actually, most of the common fixed sized fonts seem to
contain only ASCII characters (and fixed size fonts happen
to be the fonts that I use mostly).
-Martin
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