On Sat, May 23, 2026, at 02:58, Pete Resnick wrote: > To both Martins I ask: Do either of these statements mean that you > think there needs to be a change to the draft, and if so, can you > provide text?
The text in question is this: > There are many Unicode characters that obviously cannot be displayed (such as > control characters), and many whose ability to be displayed is debatable. If > an RFC includes such characters in normative or descriptive text, the RFC > needs to also clearly describe the character. This point about "debatable" isn't really the case. As I noted, it is always possible to deliver a font file that contains glyphs for characters outside of those that are widely available. PDF embed that detail and an HTML page can reference a webfont package. The only format where this is a challenge is the text format, which relies entirely on the fonts installed on someone's computer. So it's not "debatable", but more "dependent on the system configuration of the viewer". Though even there it is increasingly the case that packages like Google's Noto are addressing this shortcoming by ensuring that there is wide availability of at least one version of every glyph. I might instead suggest: > There are some Unicode characters that cannot be displayed (such as control > and whitespace characters). RFCs need to describe these characters when they > appear as they cannot be rendered. > > Many characters are also not widely available in the font packages that are > available to viewers. HTML and PDF formats can always render any character > that has a glyph, though that can involve additional steps in preparation. > However, the text publication format [RFC7994] of an RFC, as well as excerpts > copied from an RFC, are displayed using the font packages supplied by the > viewer, which might not include the necessary glyphs. To account for the > possibility that a character might not be displayed correctly, RFCs need to > include descriptions of any such characters. -- rswg mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
