Re: Syntax

Stephane Bortzmeyer said:
> On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 10:31:14AM +0100,
>  Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote 
>  a message of 48 lines which said:
> 
>> Choosing characters for identifiers: again, just borrow from
>> somewhere else, such as <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-Name>).
[...]
> Otherwise, what do you think of the solution used in RFC 4646?
> 
>    ASCCHAR    = %x21-25 / %x27-7E / UNICHAR ; Note: AMPERSAND is %x26
>    UNICHAR    = "&#x" 2*6HEXDIG ";"

I seem to have missed a message or two. What is the problem you're trying
to solve.

If it's identifiers using characters outside the ASCII regime, then you
want people to be able to write them in their own language, not encode
them. Equally, you want *an* encoding for portable use. The way we solved
this in the C Standard is that you can use such characters directly, or you
can encode them as \u#### or \U######## (where # represents a hexadecimal
digit). So I can write "xán" or "x\u00E1n", and the two are
interchangeable.

>    Characters from outside the US-ASCII [ISO646] repertoire, as well as
>    the AMPERSAND character ("&", %x26) when it occurs in a field-body,
>    are represented by a "Numeric Character Reference" using hexadecimal
>    notation

Here they're trying to encode characters for portable storage and exchange.
Is that what we need in this document?

>> I think inventing a new format, but not taking I18N is very hard to
>> defend. As far as I can tell, there's no real chance to get it
>> published.
> Hmmm, how many IETF formats are in Unicode? (Apart from those based
> only on XML, like Atom in RFC 4287.) ABNF is not, for instance (right,
> it is not a few format, the RFC is recent but it derives from an older
> format.)

For RFC 3977 we only had to use UTF-8 for "content" type things, not for
"control" type things. So, for example, a NNTP command is still ASCII.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive@demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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