[art] Re: draft-bray-unichars-09 review

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 8. Oct 2024, at 18:51, Tim Bray <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>  Our vision of how this would be used successfully was along the lines of: 
> 
>     • WG takes up a draft. That draft says "the value of this field is Unicode text." Maybe it even says "…encoded in UTF-8.” 
>     • Someone (co-chair, WG member, AD, last-call commenter) says “Which Unicode characters? Go look at [Unichars].” 
>     • The draft editor says “Oh, OK” and specifies one of the subsets from [Unichars] or maybe [PRECIS].

This document would be nice to have (*).

Unfortunately, draft-bray-unichars isn’t that document.

What it tells you is what people did in that situation some 30 years ago.
Which is nice to know, but would benefit from an analysis how the world has moved on since.
(The scenario above even points out the difference: “the value *of this field* …”.)

I continue to believe the net value of the current document in the above scenario is negative.

Grüße, Carsten

(*) As I was seeing other protocol designers struggle with this, I started writing such a document before the pandemic slowed us down.
The most recent version is at [1].

[1]: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-bormann-dispatch-modern-network-unicode-05.html