Ted, Carsten, and others,
I'm on travel and using a borrowed machine and have not been
able to follow this rather long thread carefully. Apologies if
what I'm about to say rehashes issue covered by others, but...
(1) As far as I know, we still believe in running code,
especially widely-deployed running code. I hate the idea of
BOMs in Utf-8 and have seen the harm, but, if there are widely
deployed and heavily used applications out there that depend on
it, our breaking those applications is just not what we should
be doing.
(2) I note that Dave's tests applied to Microsoft bundled
applications. If they are the main problem, then Microsoft
should be ashamed of themselves for updating those applications
to handle non-ASCII codes and then violating the clear rules for
UTf-8 (if they allow UTF-8 at all -- if they decided to not do
that and only allow, e.g., UTF-16, that would be a different
matter). While I hope bug reports have been filed, the IETF (or
RFC Editor) setting out to break those applications is just not
what we do.
(3) As someone who does normally read RFCs in ASCII (and
plain-text, see below), I consider statements such as "No
sensible person reads an ASCII RFC..." to be demeaning,
insulting, and inappropriate in the IETF. My reasons for doing
that are not important here (if anyone cases, write me offlist)
and I am not advocating them for anyone else, but I believe we
can have useful discussions here without asserting that people
in the community, especially ones who occasionally manage to
make presumably-useful contributions, are not sensible. I
suppose I should add that I don't use any of the applications
Dave listed to read RFCs or, normally, any other ASCII files.
(4) At the same time, if the complaint is about terrible
typography, that is a complaint about plain-text files without
any formatting controls and markup, not about ASCII. If someone
dislikes plain-text files, they should, IMO, be looking for a
way to do something else (e.g., PDF or HTML), not trying to
"fix" plain-text files.
(5) Failure to carefully read and study the documents that
specify new RFC formats has been a complex matter for me, one
that because complex when the IAB took actions that I
interpreted as not being interested in my expertise or opinions
on the matter. I believe the IAB is not the IESG and has the
right to independent decisions that are inconsistent with IETF
consensus and, indeed, to publish statements and RFCs that claim
the consensus is ill-informed or just plain wrong. That
includes feeling a need to defend their right to ignore my
advice and even to make it clear that they aren't interested.
If that result is that participation becomes too burdensome for
me, so be it. And, if I don't think the IAB's conclusions or
style in that regard are appropriate, my main recourse is to try
to convince the Nomcom that the IAB membership is in need of an
overhaul.
(6) If any of the new norms and tools result in plain-text files
with only ASCII characters in them starting with a BOM because
ASCII is just a subset of UTF-8, I'd consider that seriously
broken, a violation of the ASCII standard, and a few other
things. I hope tools and test suites would check for that case
and complain if it is encountered.
And, yeah, I think some (perhaps many) of us are going to need
to have simple BOM adding and removing tools around, just as we
have had tools that convert from LF-only to CRLF formats handy
and get to use them often (I note, e.g., that the online
version, of XML2RFC, used to generate and save a file using
several browsers on Windows produces LF-delimited lines).
best,
john
--On Tuesday, September 19, 2017 8:39 AM -0400 Ted Lemon
<mellon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Carsten, actually I think the main deciding factor was that
> text file presentations of RFCs are notionally legacy, not
> current. No sensible person reads an ASCII RFC, because the
> typography is terrible. So we don't have to care about this:
> in the long run, the ASCII RFC is dead anyway.
>
> The reason I jumped on your bandwagon is that I actually agree
> with you that the IETF is sending a message by doing this, and
> I agree that it's the wrong message. It would be nice if we
> could craft a solution that works for naive users of ASCII
> RFCs, and is comprehensible to non-naive users like Adam.
>
> But if we don't get sufficient consensus to talk Heather out
> of this policy, the earth will continue to rotate around the
> sun. :)
>