Subject: [Ltru] Line lengths in RFC 4645bis

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 22:25:23 -0700

I've contacted Michelle Cotton of IANA about how to manage updates to a 
UTF-8 Language Subtag Registry, and hope to hear from IANA in the next 
week or so.

I have a question about "reloading" the Registry in RFC 4645bis, if we 
are planning to switch to UTF-8.  An Internet-Draft must be in pure 
ASCII, so I'm told.  I assume that if we devise a process to manage 
updates that involves us sending hex NCRs (or some other ASCII 
representation) to IANA, and IANA converting the text to UTF-8 before 
inserting it into the Registry, then it would make sense to use the same 
process when converting the RFC 4645bis contents.  The problem is this:

1.  RFC 4645bis allows physical lines in the Registry to be up to 72 
UTF-8 bytes long.

2.  Whatever ASCII representation I use in the I-D will take more bytes 
than UTF-8.

3.  Lines in I-Ds are limited to 72 characters (xml2rfc will see to 
that).

How can I convey the correct line-breaking points to IANA so that the 
lines will come out right in the reloaded Registry?  This would be a 
particular problem for the Comments field for variant 'baku1926', which 
contains a relatively large number of non-ASCII characters.

One possibility might be to mark the line breaks with a backslash, but I 
don't want to introduce more meta-syntax than necessary.  Suggestions 
are welcome.

--
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

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---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 23:16:31 -0700

Hi -

As a technical contributor...

> From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
> To: "LTRU Working Group" <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Monday, August 06, 2007 10:25 PM
> Subject: [Ltru] Line lengths in RFC 4645bis
...
> 3.  Lines in I-Ds are limited to 72 characters (xml2rfc will see to 

I don't see the problem.  Nothing says that we have to make our lines
that long.  They can be shorter.

> contains a relatively large number of non-ASCII characters.

So it might have a few more lines than might theoretically be possible.
This doesn't seem to me to be a real problem.
 
> don't want to introduce more meta-syntax than necessary.  Suggestions 

Agreed.  My suggestion is to not worry about it.

Randy

---

From: Addison Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2007 06:19:17 -0700

> that long.  They can be shorter.

Yes, although it might look funny in the finished product.

>> This would be a 

There is no limit to the number of lines that a field may take.

> Agreed.  My suggestion is to not worry about it.

We might also give IANA a record-jar parser (I have one handy) for that 
task. A proper record-jar parser would read the I-D version creating 
logical records and then reserialize as UTF-8. The fields in the logical 
records consist of single (unlimited length) lines. The wrapping/folding 
process is part of the serialization scheme.

This doesn't affect the I-D (i.e. Randy's "don't worry about it"), but 
if we give them a tool to help with the job, it should be tested on the 
file ahead of time.

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.
Chair -- W3C Internationalization Core WG

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.