From: Francois Yergeau (FYergeau@alis.com)
Date: Wed Dec 11 2002 - 13:35:52 CST
Henry Spencer wrote:
> *You* are disregarding today's Unicode standard
As I said this is intentional, the IETF prefers normative references to ISO.
Not my call. Here is what Patrik Fältström said about this last April:
| > We could just point to Unicode 3.2, or to ISO. But we need
| > the RFC anyway.
|
| In the IETF we normally point to ISO if possible.
|
| So, I, as AD, prefer a reference to the ISO standard.
> and today's announced
> intent of 10646, in your current draft for a revised RFC 2279.
"Announced intent" is your interpretation. Fact is they were asked to
restrict to 10FFFF and refused, falling back to a policy and to rescinding
the private zones above 10FFFF. It's admittedly a half-hearted refusal, yet
turning it around to claim that they have an intent to restrict to 10FFFF
seems a bit far-fetched...
> your charter (I'm using "you" in a somewhat generic sense here) is to
> revise RFC 2279, conformance to RFC 2279 is not a requirement for you.
Well, the charter is to bring UTF-8 to Full Standard (2279 is Draft), which
does have some conformance requirements. This was discussed last April when
the current revision started. It was pointed by Ned Freed that *removing*
stuff does not prevent progressing on the standards track. Fact is,
however, that nobody really found it important enough to do. Various
comments were "That is a possibility.", "I don't particularly care about
this either way" and "At present, I don't see any good reason to take that
route". The cherry on the cake is from Ken Whistler, one of Unicode's
Technical Directors:
| I agree, even though the Unicode Standard only describes UTF-8
| out to U+10FFFF. 10646 still gives the full scheme to U-7FFFFFFF,
| and it will be awhile (if ever) before we can change that to
| deprecate all the 5- and 6-byte values. So I see no good reason
| right now to put RFC 2279 out of synch with 10646, particularly
| if it would slow down a revision of RFC 2279 now.
So there was no consensus to change 2279 and there we are. You are welcome
to make us come to our senses :-) but it will take a little pushing on
ietf-charsets@iana.org to get through the inertia.
-- François Yergeau