[rfc-i] UTF-8 and Unicode examples

[Julian Reschke]

Alex Rousskov wrote:

> What I meant is that in my experience, HTML output quality already
> does NOT imply comparable TXT output quality. Great HTML-looking RFCs
> already often do not look good in TXT. The genie of output "interface"
> quality is out of the bottle as far as xml2rfc is concerned.

Well, thatnks for saying that clearly; maybe the discussion should be 
about HTML/XML vs TXT and not about UTF8 in TXT.

Anyway, I'm aware of at least two use cases for non-ASCII characters in 
documents:

1) Contact Info

Although the document is written in English, it will contain contact and 
related information for people in all kinds of countries; and these 
people will frequently have *names* or *adresses* containing these 
characters. Forcing them to translate to plain ASCII without giving them 
a chance to at least *also* supply the correct name seems to be rude. So 
it would be a good thing if xml2rfc would accept non-ASCII characters 
inside author information, as long there'd be a mandatory additional 
field that contains the "best effort" ASCII representation.

But of course this is jusr cosmetic.


2) Protocol Information

Protocols already have to deal with non-ASCII characters; but not 
allowing them inside the spec makes it hard to discuss these issues 
(such as: if I have character "Ä" inside a file name, how would I create 
a file URL: for that). It's possible to work around these issues, but it 
would make specs much more readable by explicitly allowing *a few* 
non-ASCII characters for usage in protocol examples. Actually, one 
single non-ASCII character (specially selected for these cases) may be 
enough.


Any other use cases?


Best regards, Julian


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