> ASCII is NOT understandable by people who can't read and/or
> speak languages which use the Latin alphabet. It is not
> understandable by them now, and it was not understandable 40
> years ago.
Uh? This is an argument against the english language, not an argument
againt the character set. If someone does not speak english, it matters
very little whether the document is presented as 55x72 fixed typeset
pages, Postscript, HTML, or XML. Indeed, we could also debate whether
the documents should be made available in other languages than english,
but the experience of organizations who do that , such as the UN, the
EU, and to some degree the ITU, teaches us that quite a few lessons.
First, this is a very expensive proposition; the IETF does not quite
have the resource of maintaining a corps of interpreters. Second,
translation is time consuming, and can be the cause of many publication
delays, which can be used in standard-process games. Third, as
translation is never a perfect bijection, there is a non-zero risk of
conflicting interpretations of the various language texts, and thus lack
of interoperability.
This is not to say that we should make efforts to have the IETF
protocols documented in many languages, for people to understand. But I
would rather draw a sharp separation between the reference text, for
which a single language and a spartan presentation are adequate, and the
educational material, which ought to be available in many languages,
forms and shapes.
-- Christian Huitema
