Re: [I18ndir] [art] New Version Notification for draft-bray-unichars-06.txt

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 26. Sep 2023, at 03:59, Rob Sayre <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> The aim here is to point out that the Web (and Java, and Windows) can accommodate ill-formed Unicode. Is it possible to transmit any Windows path name via conforming JSON in UTF-8? Yes. Is it a good idea to naively design that into a protocol? No. But you might have to accept these things to be sufficiently compatible with the Web.
> 
> One could call some of this input "toxic waste", but there is a flipside. It would be something like "I'm sorry ACME Basic JSON Parser Version 1.0 can't handle web content". The other formats in the document make this intent explicit, and I support that.

There are certain industrial processes that generate toxic waste.

I would like to point out that the river next to the factory can accommodate toxic waste just fine.
For centuries, this was the way we worked, and it made a lot of business sense to do so.

But then people found out that putting the toxic waste into the river may impact other people.
People who don’t benefit from dumping that toxic waste into the river, but who now have to carry the costs caused by it (building expensive special cleanup into tap water generation, or usually just getting sick).

We call such a situation an externality [1].

Dumping ill-formed data into what should be Unicode is as convenient as dumping toxic waste in the river.
But I don’t think we should force the externality created by this on others, even if you think it makes a lot of business sense to do so.

Any document that treats dumping toxic waste into protocols by playing down this externality (e.g., by putting it at the same level as sending control characters or other “problematic” (but valid) data) is unacceptable.
The IETF should not be in the business of furthering such behavior.

Grüße, Carsten

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality