Re: ASCII art

["JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey at jefsey.com>]

At 12:19 23/11/2005, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 09:54:27AM +0100,
>  Julien.Maisonneuve at alcatel.com <Julien.Maisonneuve at alcatel.com> wrote
>  a message of 25 lines which said:
> > The IETF is probably the ONLY meaningful organisation in the world
> > that insists on using ascii-only specifications. Any rationalization
> > of that practise should try to explain why we are so exceptional

> So, saying "Everybody do it that way, we should, too" is ignoring many
> IETF idiosyncrasies.

Full agreement.

> 3) IETF attendance is quite open (here, IETF is really exceptional). 
> So, its members are a wide and diverse community and it is difficult 
> to find a format which is both better than ASCII and widely available.

This is here where however we have a real practical problem. Only 
standards and procedures written in English can be authoritative and 
Drafts needs to be designed using the ASCII charsets. This is 
acceptable when only English speaking engineers and reading users are 
concerned. This represents less than 1/4 of the world population. As 
long as the IETF addressed pure Internet technology, it was unlikely 
this would be a problem - and after all an ASCII technology can 
legitimately only documented in ASCII. This is not anymore the case 
with the increase of societal aspects in the digital ecosystem 
convergence and with multilingual issues.

The BCP 49 update the IESG has approved, and I oppose in its current 
form for that reason, creates and is unable to address that 
difficulty. As a BCP it is supposed to document practices which - by 
essence - can be increasingly authoritatively multilaterally 
documented in the concerned languages (the translation is not from an 
authoritative English text to another language, but from another 
language authoritative text to ASCII English). RFC 3066 bis engages 
the IETF in having to be unilaterally authoritative in areas where it 
has no internal expertise (and therefore no cross-expertise), no 
adequate tools and procedures and no proper resources (IANA is not 
multilingual - or even internationalized).

This is why after more drastic initial suggestions, I found the sole 
(IMHO) possible consensual technical proposition: it is to simply 
include in RFC 3066 bis a hook (two lines of additional texte) to the 
RFC 4151 format (URI-tags). This way, ASCII (and proposed RFC 3066 
constrained format) stays authoritative by default, but an external 
tagging system or procedure (whatever the script) can be 
authoritatively referred to in an RFC, an XML page or through a 
library entry, in using ASCII characters. Obviously, upgrading RFC 
4151 towards full IRI-tags support would be better. This approach 
does not address everything, but it addresses most 
(including  protection of the users against simple 
racial/cultural/religious profiling meta-spam [searches in Google 
through language tags the author might ignore (RFC 3066 bis Security 
considerations) em] and language identification encryption).

Otherwise, after being quite open, as you mention it, the IETF will 
become exceptional in our world of increasingly protected and 
respected cultural diversity, as being culturally/societally 
exclusive and the authoritative reference (language IANA registry) of 
that exclusion. I doubt this is the intent, however this is/would be 
the practice.

jfc




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