Subject: RE: I-D file formats and internationalization

From: "Nelson, David" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:43:17 -0500

Ole Jacobsen writes...

> This is a good point. It even applies to the IETF secretariat. It used
to
> be impossible to register with your "real name" if it contained
non-ASCII
> characters. I think that has changed, I recall having Seen Olafur
> Gudmundson's badge with the real Icelandic "curly d" (or whatever it
is
> called in English) at a recent meeting. I have not seen Japanese or
> Chinese or Korean, which I guess would be the next logical step...

While this is a bit of a digression, the purpose of IETF badges is (at
least) two-fold.  First, to show that the bearer has paid the
registration fee, and second, to allow other attendees to address the
bearer by name during sessions and informal conversations.  If badges
were in non-Latin character sets, it would make it difficult for me to
address the bearer in English.

It seems that there are parallels for RFCs and I-Ds. If the official
language of these documents is English, then should we have portions of
those documents represented in other languages, and more at issue, other
character sets?  In the attributions sections, one could, of course,
provide a Latin character set representation in addition to the native
national character set, for names, addresses, etc.

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---

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 14:06:38 -0800 (PST)

*> > 
  *> > Unicode support is a different matter. I find the current 
  *> > IETF policy to be incredibly bigoted. Many RFCs and I-Ds are 
  *> > currently forced to misspell the names of authors and 
  *> > contributors, which doesn't seem like correct attribution to 
  *> > me. So, I recommend that the IETF secretariat and the RFC 
  *> > Editor change their policies to allow UTF-8 text files. That 
  *> > way, older RFCs and I-Ds produced using the current tools 
  *> > would follow the same encoding.

This issue has been brought up before and has been on our list of
things to worry about for at least two years.  But we always run
aground on the following consideration: there is a substantial
constituency for have some least-common-denominator form of IETF
documents, so people can read and print them with even the most
primitive, old-fashioned (unfashionable?) tools.  Allowing extended
character sets for author names seems like a really nice idea to
the RFC Editor as well, but we see no way to do that and keep the
LCD.  You need some kind of structured document that some people
won't have the tools to display, search, print, ...  The
RFC Editor would welcome a way out of this dilemma.

It is not bigotry, only realism.

Bob Braden