[rfc-i] Data point [Re: Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-utf8-rfcs-03.txt]

[Joe Touch]

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Keith Moore wrote:
> I don't really want to get into a Mac vs. Windows war here (or anywhere,
> really). 

Agreed - thus the smiley ;-)

> I guess the point is that sometime in the distant past, the ASCII format
> chosen for RFCs was a good compromise - it was something that could
> reasonably be printed on a wide variety of different systems despite
> differences in their native representation of text files.   (Especially
> if you used the right FTP options to transfer the files.)
> 
> These days, plain text files have largely fallen into disuse among
> ordinary users, with the possible exception of those using UNIX/Linux
> systems.  So the tools that people are accustomed to using to read or
> manipulate documents may not support them very well (or at all), and OS
> vendors no longer regard the ability to print ordinary text files as an
> essential system capability.  There are of course still tools available
> on all of these systems that will deal with text files, but if users
> don't know what those tools are, they'll have a hard time reading our
> documents.
> 
> Which is why I have to wonder whether "plain UTF-8 text" is a useful
> direction to be taking RFCs.

Agreed.

Joe
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