> 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. In the real world it is common to find business cards that are printed on two sides. One side has everything printed in the Latin alphabet for an international audience, and the other side is printed in Japanese or Russian or Arabic for a local audience. If the IETF did adopt an XML format as the normative one for RFCs it would be possible to have two versions of the author info section, one with US-ASCII representation of names and addresses and the other with Unicode representations of the same. When converting to an HTML or PDF viewable representation, the US-ASCII form could be chosen by default or perhaps the Unicode version could be relegated to an appendix. > Artificially creating interop problems in written language, > by inserting arbitrary characters from foreign languages > into a communication, seems like a very bad idea. However, making those more accurate forms available elsewhere in the communication is a good idea. In the USA, a Japanese person will present their business card to you with the English side up. But in Japan, they present it with the Japanese side up. In all cases, the card contains both representations. --Michael Dillon _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf