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

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

>>> > I repeat: To inform protocol designers that it’s insufficient to say “Unicode characters” for their text fields. And, having explained why, offer reasonable alternative character repertoires.
>> 
>> That is approximately the reason why I wrote modern-network-unicode.
>> Please explain how draft-bray-unichars is more useful for this purpose.
>> 
> There are a bunch of problems with that modern-network-unicode and your rhetoric here.

Well, I tried to point out that there are problems with draft-bray-unicode, too.

I apologize for my rhetorics.  I’m from Northern Germany and never attended a debating club; we tend to say things the way they are.

> Firstly, you're talking your own book. It's your draft, and you're presenting it as somehow in opposition to the draft we're talking about. It's not.

No, it’s just a better document for the stated purpose.

> The unichars document in question doesn't make any requirements.

I can’t parse that.

> Secondly, I know less about Unicode than the draft-bray-unichars authors, Asmus, you, and James, but I still know more than almost anyone on Earth. I do not understand your document's purpose, even though I understand every sentence individually.

Thank you for pointing that out.

The reason modern-network-unicode exists is that the only advice for using Unicode on the network that we have today is RFC 5198.  This is getting long in the tooth, partially because it was derived from the historic ASCII NVT and its typewriter model really isn’t appropriate for most applications of Unicode today.  I fell into the trap myself trying to use it as a reference, which didn’t work out that well.  So I wrote a document that can take its place.  Hence “Modern”, which is just a short moniker for me, but that of course can be changed.

> Thirdly, it's called "Modern", which is always a red flag. When a document appeals to propriety with terms like "Modern" or "Proper", it just sounds like unrealistic authoritarianism to me.

Good to know.

> Lastly, we can go right to the way the IETF works: "rough consensus and running code". I don't like everything in the document, in the sense that it tries to make rules a little bit, but it sure does describe running code. Good enough, ship it.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to ship two documents with conflicting advice.  Much of the advice that could be derived from reading the first versions of draft-bray-unichars was not so good.  Besides pointing that out, I felt compelled to point out that there is a document with better advice.

The modern-network-unicode document was deliberately written in a way that it can be used as a normative reference, saving the recipients of the advice some work that would be wasted in restating its contents.  That may seem normative in itself, but the presence of lots of alternatives and variances should make it clear that only the reference from a normative document that identifies the specific ones chosen makes it so.

The document received some very good feedback during 2019; I’m unhappy that I was then distracted by other work.

Grüße, Carsten