Re: Form feed in Net-UTF8? (Was: FWD: Re: Comments onUnicode Format for Network Interchange

[Bill McQuillan <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, 2007-10-07, Dave Crocker wrote:
> John C Klensin wrote:
>> While I could live with the text you propose above, it seems to
>> me to lead onto a slippery slope.  Try substituting, for "page
>> breaks" above, terms like "alert sounds", "visual emphasis such
>> as highlighting or colored characters", or "flashing lines".
>> FormFeeds are much more frequent in text, and do appear in RFCs,
>> but the principles are, I think, the same.
> Seems like the discussion is really distinguishing among different classes of
> use, where each might be labeled distinctly and have variants of permitted
> characters.

It seems to me that this draft is trying to cover two separate areas of
concern:

1 - How to express information (UTF-8, NFC, CRLF line-endings, no BOM).

2 - What information to express.

Is it necessary to tell prospective users of Network Text which characters
are allowed for their application? Wouldn't it be simplier to merely
specify the encoding to be used and then mention that use of things like
control characters should be specified within the protocol definition?

Since the use of "text" occurs in many varied contexts, not all of which
are merely for display, I think that alerting users to the problems of
control characters and making it their responsibility to address them is
sufficient.

-- 
Bill McQuillan <[e-mail]>