RE: Comments on draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-00.txt

["McDonald, Ira" <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>]

Hi Ken,

Thanks - good criticisms of the (now dated) text of RFC 2640.

We should probably send them to the author of RFC 2640 (B Curtin at
US DISA) and to the FTP Ext WG mailing list.  

But it points up a problem - a plethora of IETF RFCs have more or
less discussion/description of the details of Unicode/ISO 10646.
And they all get painfully out-of-date - even (sometimes) before 
they are finally published as RFCs (due to the slow RFC pipeline).

I suggest that the IETF Charsets folks should try to write up
Internet authoritative references on Unicode/ISO 10646 in as
few RFCs as possible, and let revisions of other RFCs (like
RFC 2640) _refer_ to them but not _synposize_ them.

Thus (full circle), I think that the most important function of
RFC 2279bis is to standardize authoritative Best Practices for
the use of UTF-8 in new and revised Internet protocols.

Cheers,
- Ira McDonald
  High North Inc


-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Whistler [mailto:kenw@sybase.com]
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 6:14 PM
To: imcdonald@sharplabs.com
Cc: ietf-charsets@iana.org
Subject: RE: Comments on draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-00.txt


> Please look at RFC 2640 "Internationalization of FTP" (July 1999,
> Proposed Std status currently), which says:

>   The character set defined for international support of FTP SHALL be
>   the Universal Character Set as defined in ISO 10646:1993 as amended.

Whoops. That should definitely be updated to ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000
and ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001, as amended.

If anyone was truly trying to still implemented based on 10646-1:*1993*,
with its 31 amendments, just to get up to the Unicode 3.0 level, I'd
feel *real* *real* sorry for them.

> Currently, no codesets
>   have been defined outside of the 2 byte BMP.

Currently that statement is false.

>   The Unicode standard version 2.0 [UNICODE] is consistent with the
>   UCS-2 subset of ISO/IEC 10646. The Unicode standard version 2.0
>   includes the repertoire of IS 10646 characters, amendments 1-7 of IS
>   10646, and editorial and technical corrigenda.

And that statement should also be updated to reflect current
reality.

--Ken