Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>>1. I cannot print them correctly on either Windows or Mac.
>>2. I cannot view them at all on the mobile device
> These two issues can easily be solved by using the PDF or HTML versions.
Simple plain ASCII text is just fine.
>>3. I cannot enter the name of an author correctly if that name
>>includes non-ASCII characters.
> But even if you could, would you?
That's why non ASCII characters MUST NOT be used.
> I can't do anything useful with names written in anything other than
> latin characters (well, maybe also Greek).
Not merely Latin but pure ASCII and definitely NOT Greek.
> Is the tiny benefit of having the "real" name there as a
> non-normative extra really enough to change what we've been
> doing for 40 years?
Not at all. But say it to people who are insisting to use Latin-1
diacritical marks for IETF ML discussions as if it were internationally
usable.
> Correct interpretation of things like UTF-8 is highly dependent
> on context. On many systems a plain text file with non-7bit-ASCII
> characters won't be displayed as intended by default.
The problem is that UNICODE is broken that it does not carry
necessary context information, which was expected to be supplied
magically.
> So it would
> be necessary to go to HTML with &#; encodings of these characters
> or PDF to be reasonably sure they show up correctly. To me, PDF is
> unacceptable because it's even harder to display on devices other
> than computers with large screens or paper and it can't be decoded
> without complex tools. And switching to HTML just for this purpose
> isn't worth it to me.
Just rely on ISO2022 and everything works just fine.
> But then, I've never written a draft that
> equired non-ASCII characters so that's easy for me to say.
I did write an RFC and drafts on how character encoding could have
been internationalized.
Moreover, for these 10 years, I have developped a simple and straight
forward theory on what, actually, is unification. I can elaborate, if
you are interested in.
Masataka Ohta
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