Subject: RE: I-D file formats and internationalization

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:47:06 +0100

At 19:43 30/11/2005, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
>In effect the message is sent out 'you do not really belong here', 'you
>are a second class citizen', 'the IETF is an American organization and
>the only people who really matter are going to be American'.

The situation is rather simple. The leading economic, military, 
technical, power is American. The USA is also the place in the world 
the less knowledgeable about others (4% of the students take foreign 
languages, 84% of the citizens have no passport). This makes 
necessary for others to adapt to this big "black hole".

But this effort is not the RFC 3935 religion: "The mission of the 
IETF is to produce high quality, relevant technical and engineering 
documents that _influence_ the way people  design, use, and manage 
the Internet"."The IETF community wants the Internet to _succeed_ 
because we _believe_ that the existence of the Internet, and its 
_influence_ on economics, communication, and education, will help us 
to build a _better_human_society_." With a unilateral definition of 
the Internet, very similar to the 47 USC 230 (f)(1) legal US 
definition, and no more as the free adherence to the IETF documents.

>The fact that Brian is English and lives in Zurich is irrelevant. People
>take their names very seriously and personally. It's a question of
>outreach. Having one meeting out of three held outside North America
>each year is not outreach, it is a holiday.

The reverse is more and more true. After 9/11 less and less foreign 
students and searchers come to the USA. Tunis is actually a deal. 
After the deregulation, the USA were left without a nationwide 
datacoms system. The Internet provided it 15 years late: the cons and 
pros lead the rest of the world to adapt. But the cons and pros have 
drastically changed. Tunis deal is that the "other countries give the 
USA five years - more probably 10 years - to upgrade to the level 
they want to be 10 years from now".

The world today think it can work with a non-US based world system 
and even accept a lower grade US system as no more a core system. The 
decentralised world network, after a forced US centralisation, 
resumes expansion toward a fully distributed network. KPNQuest 
bankruptcy and New-York black-out consequences have taught their 
lessons. The problem today is the transition without strangulation.

>I am currently at the W3C AC meeting. They are also involved in the
>ongoing 'internet governance' discussions but the W3C is involved a
>participant in the discussions while the IETF is one of the topics of
>the discussions. Needless to say it is better to be a participant than
>the topic. The W3C has avoided concern by being conspicuously
>international in its approach. The IETF has had the attitude 'this is
>the way we do things here, nobody asked you to like it'.

The real US problem is that the IETF architecture does not innovate 
and deliver what is expected (look at the new propositions on the 
"IAB Discuss" mailing list. This made the USG late on their 
http://whitehouse.gov/pcipb plan. And to call on alternative plans 
(NSF). We waited, we cannot wait anymore.

>It is simply a fact of modern life that the ability to speak English
>well is an essential qualification for almost all forms of knowledge
>work, particularly at the research and elite levels.

The English has cons and pros. At this time it is a good protection 
against balkanisation. If some of the ASCII documents limitations are 
waived (what I said about references and authoritative referents). It 
permits to keep some good cooperation among the US/EU/Japan R&D. It 
may help also to keep close with India - the largest English speaking 
nation. But you are right: probably more network engineers will be 
educated in Chinese than in any other (English included) languages.

Its cons is the "unique technical thinking/vision" it tends to lead 
to. After permitting a compact team [until the mid-80] to bootstrap, 
it is a steriliser. Someone noted that German could not word English 
Internet concepts. This is interesting because this necessarily mean 
that German Internet concepts might have been different. I know many 
key French concept that cannot translate in English. The Internet 
might have been richer, simpler, more performing, more stable and 
secure - the usual benefits from established multilateral alliances 
and lucid mutual respects.

>That does not mean that a group of mostly English speakers should 
>also make good English an essential qualification at the apprentice 
>and journeyman stages of learning the craft.

On Dec. 14th, that group (approving the RFC 3066 bis) has elected 
itself as the world center of competence and reference to identify 
the languages of every nation. I am sure it is ready to support that 
big new challenging and exciting mission in welcoming people like me, 
of every language to share into its resulting duties.

jfc

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---

From: Robert Sayre <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 15:19:43 -0500

On 11/30/05, Jeroen Massar <[email-masked]> wrote:
> You can of course publish drafts and RFC's as XML which supports any
> character set you want.

AFAIK, RFC2026 still applies:

"the ASCII text version is the definitive reference"

> One can always start translating RFC's:

This is true. But it has nothing to do with my original message, which
suggested that the format for the definitive reference be changed to
UTF-8 text documents. This is a simple, backward compatible change.
Artwork and natural languages are interesting topics that could
probably be debated separately.

--

Robert Sayre

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 15:00:25 +0100

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

> The fact that Brian is English and lives in Zurich is irrelevant.

As a matter of fact I don't live in Zürich; I live near Genève.

Of course this matters. The problem is that it's not quite as
straightforward as people think. I'm attempting to send this
in UTF-8; I wonder how many people will receive it correctly?

    Brian

---

From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 09:17:08 -0500

You may have sent it in UTF-8, but arrived here as  ASCII :

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by  
mtagate3.uk.ibm.com id
	jB5E0WQg115170

Was that the intent ?

Regards
Marshall

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:03:42 +0100

Marshall Eubanks wrote:
> X-Spam-Score: 0.0 (/)
> X-Scan-Signature: 68c8cc8a64a9d0402e43b8eee9fc4199

It wasn't *my* intent :-)

But in fact, that's the transfer encoding that got converted.
My outgoing transfer encoding was Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
The content type was still tagged as UTF-8.

OTOH your response is tagged Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
and indeed did get converted somewhere, at your end I suspect.

It's not so easy to assert that UTF-8 just works.

    Brian

---

From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 10:33:00 -0500

One interesting thing is that the umlaut on the U in Zurich and
the accent grave in Geneva came though, and came back as well (on the  
response to my response). They  look fine,
and are coded as " ZÃ¼rich; GenÃ¨ve"

So, if your use of UTF-8 was intended to display that, I think that  
(for me, OS X 10.4.3) the software did the
right thing.

Marshall

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 17:37:49 +0100

> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
                                    ^
ASCII? -----------------------------+

And your response was in ISO-8859-1; the characters survived the transition.
Perhaps there's hope..

---

From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 11:50:39 -0500

Hello Harald;

> And your response was in ISO-8859-1; the characters survived the  

Yes, things seemed to have surprisingly well, which does give  
glimmers of hope. Even this seems to go back and forth OK. Of course,  
if it doesn't, it might be
hard to reconstruct...

Довяй но провяй !
Marshall

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 23:08:49 +0100

Marshall Eubanks wrote:

> Even this seems to go back and forth OK. Of course, if it
> doesn't, it might be hard to reconstruct...
 
> Довяй но провяй !

...test it. <g>  Seriously, nobody but me uses a pre-UTF-8 MUA.

                            Bye, Frank

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 23:34:44 +0100

>> Довяй но провяй !

Dont know what it means but it looks great to me...:-)

> ...test it. <g>  Seriously, nobody but me uses a pre-UTF-8 MUA.

happy santa Santa Claus eve

marc

-- 
"You see, all the problems in the world are created by those who want
'perfection.' " Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

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