On Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 12:59 PM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
--On Saturday, December 06, 2014 17:21 +0000 Stephen Farrell
<stephen.farrell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On 06/12/14 17:06, John Levine wrote:
>> PS: Thought experiment: Let's say we made RFC 20 a full
>> standard. What Bad Things will happen?
>
> Some people will be upset. Same as if we don't do that:-)
Based on working in some closely-related areas, the only
legitimate objection I can think of would come from folks who
would claim that ASCII has outlived its usefulness and that we
should drop all references to ASCII, US-ASCII, and RFC 20 in
favor of what I guess would be something like "the Basic Latin
and C0 repertoire of Unicode, represented by code points U+0000
through U+007F, coded in UTF-8".
That would be a silly approach. The reason we use ASCII is that our protocols all deal in byte streams and it is a byte oriented encoding.
One point that we might want to reconsider however is the presentation of the RFC. At the moment it is in TXT format which leads to the bootstrap objection. And until recently that was the only option we had for presenting RFCs.
Presenting a character encoding table is one specific case where an image is more appropriate. Since that was how the original RFC20 was presented and we are looking at a transcription into ASCII, it would be more appropriate to reformat RFC20 in the new presentation format.
That would not require changing the number of course since none of the text would change.