I must say that I'm very disappointed by this development. I'm NOT
disappointed by the efforts to represent non-ASCII names and other text
faithfully in documents.
What bugs me is that the ASCII RFC format was, by careful choices of
character encoding, line lengths, page lengths, and placement of form
feeds, designed to be maximally readable on as many existing systems as
possible. By contrast, the UTF8 RFC format subverts that goal in favor
of being able to represent names and non-English text faithfully in
bits, only to have them be rendered unfaithfully by a great many
present-day applications.
Having a UTF8 RFC format wouldn't have bothered me, having UTF8 replace
the ASCII format bothers me much more. It's hard to escape the
impression that being "fair" has become more important than having the
technical content of RFCs be readable.
Keith
On 09/14/2017 05:07 PM, 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. 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