Re: the advocates for non-ASCII RFC's

[Michael Mealling <michael at bailey.dscga.com>]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 01:26:07AM -0800, James P. Salsman wrote:
> > Who are these people?
> 
> Perhaps they are from the majority of humans who use languages 
> written with glyphs absent from ASCII (and I don't mean Smalltalk-79.)
> 
> Or maybe they have a pressing need to use the International 
> Phonetic Alphabet entities because the "new economy" synchronous 
> telephony systems are insufficiently more useful than ordinary 
> "old economy" synchronous telephony systems, and the only way 
> some of the necessary engineering staff will ever get interested 
> in asynchronous telephony is if they get to use the IPA for their 
> latest compression schemes.
> 
> Maybe they want to be able to include UNICODE art, which is much 
> like ASCII art but more creative.
> 
> Whoever they are, and whatever they want, they will probably agree 
> that also having an English version, in ASCII, in addition to the 
> non-ASCII version if there is one, is a good thing.

So what's stopping them from doing that now? I've seen versions of RFCs 
on the net where someone has either included comments
in the document or translated it. I've even seen Powerpoint versions of
an RFC. You could even put a pointer to it in the document itself. 
Since I use "Marshall's XML Stuff" I end up with the text version 
as well as an HTML version which I put up on cnrp.net. I could even 
imagine a slight change to the artwore tag to allow multiple representations 
of the artwork depending on the intended output. I send in the ASCII text 
since its canonical and make the other versions available for those 
that need it. Seems pretty simple to me....

-MM

P.S. Until you can get /bin/vi to correctly handle the entire Unicode
standard (BIDI), IMHO, 'UNICODE art' is up there with 
transporters and Faster Than Light warp engines....

-- 
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Michael Mealling	|      Vote Libertarian!       | www.rwhois.net/michael
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