Subject: [Cellar] non-ascii characters

From: Dave Rice <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 10:24:41 -0400

Hi cellar,

I’m doing an idnits review on the latest ffv1 draft and am confused about the IETF rules for non-ascii characters in txt rfc drafts. The update at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7997 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7997> seems to allow the RFC Editor to use some discretion in using non-ascii characters, but idnits <https://tools.ietf.org/tools/idnits/> still complains about that. One instance is using a Unicode minus sign to be more semantically clear than an ascii hyphen. Also since the Unicode minus sign uses more bytes than the ascii hyphen, idnits will say the line is too long, even though in appearance the line displays within the correct width.

In the RFC for ffv1, we’ve used unicode symbols for floor and ceiling functions, such as ⌊a⌋ and ⌈a⌉, but rfc2xml transforms these into their hexadecimal expressions such as &#8970;a&#8971; and &#8968;a&#8969;. Any advice, should we listen to idnits and avoid non-ascii characters or listen to rfc7997 and use them when it makes the content more clear?

Kind Regards,
Dave Rice