Re: Why the normative form of IETF Standards is ASCII

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Since we are destined to keep pretending that character sets and document formats are one and the same...

Martin Rex <mrex at sap dot com> wrote:

all unicode codepoints from their glyphs (and a number of them can not be distinguished by their glyphs), and even worse, most machines/environments do not even have fonts to display glyphs for most of the unicode codepoints.

That is an argument for not allowing *all* Unicode characters.

Which languages do you want to discriminate against, and on what grounds? Anything beyond US-ASCII is unfair to those that are not in the set.

Since there are some users who cannot display 100,000 discrete characters, let's restrict all users to 95 characters, discriminating against every language except English and Swahili. Brilliant.

Some people think internationalized domain names are a good idea. I think they are a pretty stupid idea, because they're a significant roadblock for international communication. Lots of people around the globe will have severe difficulties accessing some Web-Site that uses a fancy internationalized domain name, or someone using a fancy internationalized email address. If you don't happen to know the language, recognize the gylphs and have a platform where you can actually create/type that on your keyboard, then you will not be able to read&use such web server or email addresses from paper or television ads or from a paper business card.

Domain names in Cyrillic or Arabic or Han aren't intended for you and me, they're intended for users who know those "fancy" scripts and are able to input those "fancy" characters. If the owners of those Web sites and e-mail addresses want to reach Latin-script users, they will have a Latin-script domain name as well.

But more often than not, the screen-oriented formatting in HTML resuls in the printouts being truncated at the right border or filled with white spaces.

This is true only when the page author has included a big, wide graphic image that redefines the minimum width of the page to be wider than can fit on the printed page. It is not an inherent flaw of HTML.

--
Doug Ewell  |  Thornton, Colorado, USA  |  http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14  |  ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s ­



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