Subject: [Ltru] Re: UTF-8

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:48:23 -0700

Addison Phillips <addison at yahoo dash inc dot com> wrote:

> The question is: can the LSR and/or his/her proxy (i.e. Doug) manage to 
> send email to IANA encoded as UTF-8. All other emails are "nice to have", 
> but not required. I think the answer here is that they can manage it.

I would be happy to jump through whatever hoops are needed to get the 
Registry established and maintained in UTF-8, if that is the wish of the WG. 
Certainly I can send mail in UTF-8, and even if I couldn't, I could attach a 
file.

I believe other people in the WG had arguments against a UTF-8 Registry.  I 
suspect they are using systems or applications that are not fully 
Unicode-enabled.  I would like to reiterate that browsers and fonts are by 
no means the only parts of a computer system that determine whether UTF-8 is 
supported or not.

> The "compelling reason" against UTF-8 that I've seen has nothing to do 
> with email or browser availability or IANA's skill set. It is simply that 
> it is a change in the registry format and could break existing 
> implementations that rely on the ASCII format.

This is true.  RFC 4646bis could specify that either UTF-8 or hex escapes 
are acceptable formats for the Registry, which would allow new 
implementation to read old copies of the Registry, but I don't know how to 
solve the reverse problem (if such it is).

> I note also that UTF-8 has failed to reach consensus on at least three 
> separate occasions.

One problem is that it's been conflated with other issues, such as XML  I 
applaud Randy's efforts to separate the discussions and get each question 
answered one by one.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru