At 8:16 AM -0700 5/10/05, Walter Underwood wrote:
If publishers and subscribers have obstacles to using Atom, that sounds like a problem to me.
It is a problem, of course.
"Everyone has this problem" is not a good reason to ignore it.
No one is ignoring it. This thread started because the format draft pointed out at least one aspect of the problem, which is more than most other RFCs do.
Someone has to be the first to solve it, might as well be us.
May I suggest that there are groups with more experience in the area than ours that would be more appropriate? In specific, since this problem affects all internationalized text, the Unicode Consortium has a much higher chance of "solving" the problem than an IETF Working Group who is focused on a syndication format.
If you have a proposed solution to the problem (you didn't include one in your message to the WG), the Unicode Consortium is quite open to outside input on this type of thing.
It is not acceptable to build formats for the "English Wide Web". That doesn't exist any more.
That is both grossly insulting to those of us have spent a great deal of time trying to make the Internet internationalization-friendly, and is also grossly technically inaccurate, unless you consider every written language other than Chinese, Japanese Kanji, Burmese, Khmer, Thai, Tagalog, Lao, and Tibetan to be "English". (The folks who speak all the other languages might find you calling them "English" to be insulting too, of course.)
--Paul Hoffman, Director --Internet Mail Consortium
