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On 10/9/17 10:14 AM, John C Klensin
wrote:
--On Wednesday, September 27, 2017 08:38 +1300 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:So why don't we, the Internet standards people who believe in rough consensus and running code, request the RFC Editor (a friend of ours) to supply two text versions of each RFC, like https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8187.txt as today, with BOM if relevant https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8187.ut8 containing pure UTF-8 with no BOM everIf one were really going to do that, one would need three representations (pick your own three-character suffixes for the first two): rfc8176.utf8 (standard/normal Unicode in UTF-8, no BOM) rfc8176.utf8-with-BOM (as above, but...) rfc8176.txt (ASCII, with characters outside the ASCII repertoire expressed as \u'[N[N]]NNNN' (see RFC 5137) or another escaping system of the RFC Editor's choice.
A few points to consider. First, the RFC Editor will review, at
least to some extent, every file we produce, and our tools will
need to be modified to create the additional formats; that
complexity would then need to be maintained going forward. The
more files added, the more resources it will take to produce. This
has implications for either the time it takes to publish or the
cost it takes to publish. Second, there have also been some
discussions about creating separate files for paginated versus
unpaginated text files. That would take us up to six files just
for the plain-text outputs (noting the RFC Editor also has the
PDF/A-3 and HTML to review). Alternatively, the IETF community that prefers plain text can develop tools that takes the one file created by the RFC Editor and strip the BOM, add pagination, or run it through a translation tool to get it in their native language--these will not be produced or reviewed by the RFC Editor, but will perhaps meet the individual desires here. Given the number of options, opinions, and resources involved, I think this makes the most sense.
-Heather |