Hello Pete,
Many thanks for this great summary.
On 2025-10-31 01:45, Pete Resnick wrote:
Hi all,
Here's my take of the consensus state of the non-editorial issues
brought up during WGLC on 7997bis, not in any particular order. If you
think I've blown it, either getting the consensus wrong or missing an
issue that you thought was substantive and not editorial, now is the
time to let me know. (I haven't put anything in here that Paul already
said, "Yeah, I'll make that change.")
1. U+ notation vs. Unicode names: People seem happy with "use either or
both, whichever is sensible in the circumstance". Should also say this
in the example on color. Leave anything else to the style guide.
2. Brian's suggestion for an explicit "RPC will apply its best judgment"
<https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/rswg/
CQZqJi4tLR5qjua2BaNgQP3vtLk>: Not much interest
Agree; I think this can stay implicit.
3. Whether the policy is aimed "for the reader" or "for the author":
Consensus seems to me that the doc should say something about authors.
Some explicit support from Brian's suggestion in <https://
mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/rswg/zF2-lBMYYDPj-igQivMo3O5ivWo>. Might
also want something saying, "The RPC style guide will define which
characters authors may use and how."
As long as the style guide is an RFC, or something with similar change
rate, I think this is way too inflexible. We already have successful use
of non-ASCII characters at least in the Latin script that where used
without any explicit guidance.
4. "English is the language of RFCs": Consensus seems to me that
something should be said in this document, since the style guide is not
an RSWG policy, just RPC implementation, and no other RSWG document says
so explicitly. It's not necessarily perfectly related to this document,
but probably no significant harm putting it in.
5. JCK's suggestion to change "as long as the reader of an RFC can
interpret that text" to "as long as there is a high expectation that
readers of an RFC will be able to interpret its text as intended". No
objections noted, so sounds like we should go forward with it.
6. Searching requirement being too expansive: Brian provided some
possible text, others suggested reverting to 7997 language, Brian
suggested maybe to remove it entirely. Not quite clear consensus.
It really depends on what kind of search we talk about. Search engines
shouldn't be a problem at all, they easily deal also with spelling
mistakes. Search in a text editor or with a command such as grep is more
difficult. But copy-paste is really your friend here.
7. Distinguishing "individual characters" from "strings" in section 3
ff: No particular takers on this (other than JCK himself who posted
about it). Would like to hear more. (Chair hat off: Sounds like
something for the style guide, not policy.)
My take is that JCK has a point, but that having separate sections on
individual characters and on strings is most probably overkill. I'd
propose that we solidify the content, and then give it another reading
to tweak things so that they aren't wrong (just occasionally changing
"character" to "characters" or so may go a long way).
8. JCK's 4(a) - 4(c) on NFC, directionality, naming: No discussion so
far, but again, with chair hat off, this sounds like style guide
material, not policy.
In particular with respect to (4c), I'd argue that there's *nobody* with
a name such as Cyrillic "раураӏ".
(Just in case there were, it would be required to also have a Latin
script equivalent (most probably something like "Raupai"), at which
point it would be clear that it's not Latin script, and any interested
user could cut-and-paste it into a tool that would reveal the exact code
points if needed.)
9. JCK's 5 on making a list of scripts and languages: No discussion.
Silence is not a good basis on which to judge consensus.
Already said so above, but I think this makes things too inflexible. If
the RPC really feels it would help them, they can always start such a
list, but there's also a danger this would be interpreted as
exclusionary (somebody claiming somewhere "RFCs can be written by
Chinese and Japanese, but not Koreans" just because the RPC didn't yet
have a case of a Korean author and therefore didn't yet put
Korean/Hangul in the list).
I hope that is useful. Let me know if I've missed/misconstrued anything.
Please add the issues from my mail today (Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2025
16:57:49 +0900) to Paul and the WG.
Regards, Martin.
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