Re: FWD: I-D ACTION:draft-klensin-unicode-escapes-00.txt

["Clive D.W. Feather" <[e-mail]>]

John C Klensin said:
> If you have any interest in internationalization issues, a
> careful reading of, and comments on, this proposal would be
> greatly appreciated.  

Please remove the term "extended ASCII" from 1.1 - there is no such thing.
If you want to talk about an 8 bit character set, then "the ISO 8859
family" would do.

At the end of 3.1, you can't say "the same considerations" apply to
Punycode and such encodings, because they *are* more compact (your third
and textually closest point).

I disagree with the claim that the \u notation is easier to read and less
"ugly and awkward" than the HTML one. Is:

    Ank\uabcdef

really easier to parse than:

    Ankꯍef

? I think - particularly in contexts using alphabetic text - that having a
clear and obvious delimiter is much more preferable and will produce far
less mistakes.

I can accept that the specific HTML notation is a bit clumsy, and in
particular that the use of 'x' implies other bases are available. Therefore
I would prefer something like \u(xxxx).

The text in 3.2 implies that \U is followed by 6 digits, not 8. That risk
of confusion (particularly since Unicode ends at U+10FFFF) is itself
reason for concern with any undelimited option.

I haven't seen a "consensus" that there isn't a problem with being
case-sensitive; the fact that you messed up the ABNF on this particular
point is evidence that this is unwise. I know C does it that way (and in
retrospect, I would have fought harder for doing it differently), but C has
always been case sensitive in such matters. IETF protocols mostly aren't.

Reference [ISO-C-Chars] is wrong - the \u and \U notation was added to
ISO 9899 in the 1999 edition, not in that TR. They aren't extensions; they
are part of the core language.

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