[Ltru] Wrapping up the UTF-8 debate

Hi -

As a co-chair...

> From: "Addison Phillips" <addison@yahoo-inc.com>
> To: "John Cowan" <cowan@ccil.org>
> Cc: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@roadrunner.com>; "LTRU Working Group" <ltru@ietf.org>
> Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 11:14 PM
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Draft-4645bis-01 expires
...
> This editor, please note, is growing annoyed with the on-and-off nature 
> of the UTF-8 argument. I wish verily that the chairs would determine a 
> consensus or lack thereof.
...

Unfortunately, the technical discussion has thus far not worked through
all of the key points that need to be addressed before it makes sense
for us to declare a consensus.  Several decompositions of the issues
have been presented, but as I see it these are the related questions
that must *all* be answered before we can declare a consensus on this
bundle of issues called the "UTF-8 argument."

   1)  Are we willing to use a representation (for the discussion
       of changes on the ietf-languages@iana.org list and communication
       with IANA) which is different (perhaps only mechanically/trivially so)
       from what is actually published in the registry files?

   2)  The registry file itself currently uses something which is similar
       to an NCR.  Are we willing to change the registry format to
          a) use actual NCRs for non-ASCII code points, making conversion
             to XML even more trivial than it already is, while still
             giving some fallback to folks inspecting the data for errors
             or looking at it through ASCII windows
          b) embed the actual (UTF-8 encoded) characters into the file
          c) something else?

   3)  Are we going to instruct IANA to maintain a "pure" ASCII version
       of the registry, in which everything not ASCII will have been flattened
       or translitered?

My sense of the discussion so far is that folks are OK with (1), and that
(3) won't have enough support to justify the cost.  The part that still needs
to be hashed out is the choice between (2a), (2b) and (2c).

So, please, let's wrap this up.  To me this means:

Determining what we need to say about (1) in 4646bis.
Making a choice from the various options in (2).
Agreeing that (3) is not our problem.

Randy

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