On Dec 1, 2005, at 8:34 AM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
The suggestion of the HTML escape would ensure readability.
Fully disagree. Listing an author as Patrik Fältström is
not "readable".
The suggestion was for an alternate field in the XML input file to
contain non-ASCII versions of authors and titles of references used
to augment the ASCII version when the output form allows. The idea
of a escape mechanism was to allow the definition of non-ASCII
characters elsewhere as perhaps could be needed to clarify protocol
related issues.
It
would allow an alternative display that remains compatible with an
ASCII
limitation as the authoritative version.
It would mix escaped HTML into text/plain documents. It would also
make RFCs that talk about HTML extremely difficult to read, because
the reader would not know if entities in examples are supposed to
be the escaped or unescaped versions.
This would require a convention with respect to what gets converted.
How often are numeric HTML Unicode characters used? If this appears
to be problematic, then simply retain the escape sequence in all
output forms.
UTF-8 use would require
additional considerations regarding searching however.
Please list those; they would be valuable for the Internet Draft.
You talk about some of the issues in your draft. Even when just
ASCII is used, there is difficulty discerning differences between
characters, where one's ability is largely determined by familiarity
with a particular font style. Cyrillic could be an example of there
being more than one character-repertoire that may be used. Going
from 94+ characters to thousands is obviously more of a challenge for
those wishing to pose a search.
Perhaps within a few years, as Unicode becomes more ubiquitous and
such issues have been resolved with better tools, resistance against
full adoption may be less. In my view, the place to start would be
with the ID and alternative output forms, and not the ASCII RFC. It
seems regimenting where exceptions are allowed makes sense, where an
authoritative ASCII document is retained for now. At some point in
time, you will be right.
-Doug
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