Dave Cridland wrote: > > The IAB made a clear statement that we need i18n support, yet over a > decade after RFC 2130 or RFC 2825, the RFCs themselves still have a > strict ASCII limitation. Sure, that wasn't mentioned at the time, but > does nobody else find this plain shameful? You taking this completely out-of-context. rfc2825 says this: ... providing all users of the Internet with the capability of using their own language and its standard character set to express themselves, write names, ... So what it says is that all users should be able to write names in *THEIR* language. This means that e.g. a japanese should be able to write text, their names and everyone elses names in japanese using _only_ graphical kanji characters. Since we are writing RFCs in the _english_language_, so that they can be consumed by the widest possible audience, _all_ text in them ought to be written in the english language. The agreed upon character set to represent the english language in RFCs and I-Ds is called "International Alphabet 5" or "US-ASCII". Authors from some of the asian languages need to provide their name spelled with letters from the IA5String alphabet, and so are authors from european countries using one of the iso8859-n alphabets. And if we should change anything about the Author's Address section, then it would be to replace the contact information with URLs to an IETF web server where each author can update/maintain his contact information. If HTML is used to provide that information, then authors could provide their name in their own language and using their own character set (Arabic,Hanzi,Hebrew,Kanji,ISO-Latin-X,whathaveyou) in addition to the US-ASCII representation -- and that would be a I18N use in the sense of rfc2825. Interop problems are frequently when people try to communicate with speech and have strong accents (caused by the difference in vocal sounds between their mother language and the language they try to communicate in). Artificially creating interop problems in written language, by inserting arbitrary characters from foreign languages into a communication, seems like a very bad idea. -Martin _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf