New draft (Was: I-D ACTION:draft-klensin-unicode-escapes-00.txt

John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com> Mon, 29 January 2007 14:08 UTC

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Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 08:33:35 -0500
From: John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
To: discuss@apps.ietf.org
Subject: New draft (Was: I-D ACTION:draft-klensin-unicode-escapes-00.txt
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Hi.

We have reached the point at which several people are repeating
essentially the same suggestions.  That probably represents
progress, but it also indicates to me that the -00 version of
the draft has outlived its usefulness.

I've just submitted draft-klensin-unicode-escapes-01.txt and
assume it will show up in the posting directory today or
tomorrow.  

Highlights (if I got things right):
	
	* All of the typographic editorial errors that have been
	identified have been fixed.
	
	* The preference for \u / \U has been removed and the
	document restructured to express no preference among the
	several ways to denote Unicode code points.  However,
	the preference of many for paired delimiters has been
	made explicit, as has a prohibition on surrogates.
	
	* The issue of escaping escapes has been avoided,
	leaving that problem to the applications and protocols
	that use the escapes.  That may not be good enough, but
	it at least moves us forward and should facilitate a
	focused discussion.

There are two sets of suggestions I haven't followed (yet):

	* Frank made a strong recommendation that we make an
	explicit and normative reference to W3C's CharMod spec
	and call out several of its explicit rules.  There is a
	tradeoff with length, additional need to read other
	documents, and general document and reading complexity.
	It may no longer be needed.  Opinions and comments
	welcome.
	
	* I have not touched the ABNF associated with the \u /
	\U case.  I have inserted an explicit placeholder but,
	as discussed on this list, I think we need to figure out
	what we want to do and then go back and adjust the
	metalanguage productions.   In particular, there has
	been one strong suggestion, with which I agree, that we
	not take the obvious approach of substituting %x5C.75
	for "\u", since the intent is a character string
	abstraction (independent of the implementation character
	set) rather than specific octets.

thanks,
    john