On 2017/09/15 06:07, Heather Flanagan (RFC Series Editor) wrote:
Hello all,
RFC 8187, "Indicating Character Encoding and Language for HTTP Header
Field Parameters", is the first RFC to be published with UTF-8 encoding
and include characters not in the basic ASCII character set. This
document has been, with the author's consent, patience, and support,
used to test the existing tool chain to produce RFCs to see where the
environment has difficulty in handling non-ASCII characters.
Congratulations to everybody involved! Really great to see this move
forward!
Regards, Martin.
P.S.: Looking at the RFC, there were exactly 5 non-ASCII characters (two
'£'s and one '€' in the examples, and two 'ü's, one in Julian's address
and one in my name in the acks. Now if I ever need a claim to fame, I
can claim that my name contributed to the first non-ASCII characters in
RFCs :-).
P.P.S.: Regarding the content of that RFC, I think may already know, but
for the record, I'll repeat here that I think it's way outdated. I
really wish the HTTP WG would take some hints from this RFC work and
finally get the message that straightforward UTF-8 is the way to go (we
all knew that ages ago, anyway).
The RPC is
continues this testing with the PRECIS document cluster (C326), which is
currently in AUTH48.
The RPC and the Tools Team has identified several areas that need to be
modified to support these characters. Some of those areas will
ultimately be handled with the new format tools; others have been
modified as part of the more general work to prepare for the new RFC
format. For the documents being used to test the toolchain, a
significant amount of manual processing is required to publish the
RFCs with non-ASCII characters in the final text. In order to keep
overall processing times down, leave staff enough time to test
the other tools that are being developed as part of the RFC format
project, and allow the editors time to create and/or update new
procedures as the v3 tools are released, no additional non-ASCII
documents outside of RFC 8187 and the PRECIS cluster will be published
until the new format tools are in production.
Many thanks go out to Julian Reschke and Peter Saint-Andre for their
support, the Tools Team for answering a variety of technical questions,
and to the RPC staff who worked to ensure that the RFC
publication process resulted in readable RFCs.
Heather Flanagan, RSE