Re: draft-klensin-net-utf8-06

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 03:49:22PM -0400,
 John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 66 lines which said:

> I hope we are converging:

My opinion is that, yes, the document is better and more stable than
it was.

I've read and reviewed -06 and I find it suitable for Last Call, with
no serious pending issues.

> (2) There are many ways in which the document could be more or less
> radically reorganized.

The "historical" or "rationale" sentences (such as "In retrospect, one of
the advantages of ASCII [X3.4-1978] when it was chosen was that the
code space was full when the Standard was first published") could
certainly be more separated from the normative text but I do not see
this issue as a serious problem. The text seems clear.

> (8) While a few people advocated it, I can't see making the NFC
> requirement a MUST.  [...] Second, if NFC on sending is a MUST, then
> receivers have the right to expect that they will see only
> NFC-normalized forms on input.  That assumption is dangerous, since,
> in general, there is no way to know whether a sender is following
> this spec.

While I agree with the SHOULD, I do not think the reason given above
is a good one. If we follow it, *all* MUST in RFCs could be changed to
SHOULD, in the name of the robustness principle. 

IMHO, the best reason for keeping the SHOULD ("applications should
send a NFC-normalized stream") is the argument about libraries that
the application does not control.