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

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

On torsdag, okt 3, 2002, at 20:11 Europe/Stockholm, Francois Yergeau 
wrote:

> - I think it would be better for *this* RFC to refrain from telling 
> senders
> and receivers what to do with the BOM, but to offer advice to protocol
> designers.  It is specific protocols that should know better where the 
> BOM
> should be banned or allowed.

Not correct, _this_ RFC have to be stringent enough so it is crystal 
clear whether BOM should be there, what is to happen if it exists, and 
what is to happen if it doesn't. This in turn have to be verified in an 
Interoperability test, for example using protocols which allow tagged 
and untagged UTF-8 and digital signatures, which ensures we have 
multiple implementations of the standard.

The documentation of this interoperability (which doesn't have to be a 
formal test, but documented) is part of the last call which I am to 
issue as soon as we have a document and the documentation.

 From IETF point of view, we do _not_ like alternate byte orders. We had 
this discussion in IESG when UTF-16* charsets were to be registered. 
Many voices in the IESG only wanted to register "the correct one". The 
author (Paul) and myself argued for always having tags for every weird 
charset, but say strongly only one format SHOULD be used.

What I hear on this list is that the consensus is that BOM SHOULD NOT 
be used. I would like it to be MUST NOT be used in Internet protocols, 
which leads to tagged UTF-8 text be illegal if the BOM exists in the 
text.

Anyway, what needs to happen now is two things:

  - The text in the document has to be change to say BOM is not to be 
used
  - Someone has to write down interoperability information between
    applications

Regarding the interoperability, as Francois is working hard with the 
document, can I get someone else to write this? I myself are mostly 
irritated I can not copy and paste Unicode text between TextEdit and 
Microsoft software in MacOSX, so I might not be the best person to 
write down things that work.... :-(

     Regards, paf