From: "Philip Prindeville" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
jdow wrote:
From: "Philip Prindeville" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
are fired... And you might have a specific set of rules for a list
like
alsa-devel (the 'L' in ALSA is for Linux, so it might be reasonable
to assume that no one will be posting with charset='windows-1252'...
it's also an English language list, so having 'ok_languages en' would
be reasonable as well).
This would be a pretty bad idea. I develop Linux stuff and on
linux, but my
mail system is either OE or Outlook on Windows boxen. I can't be
the only
one.
Loren
Well, I don't know.
The RFC's are pretty clear that western European languages are encoded
as USASCII => ISO-8859-1 => UTF-8 in that order, no exceptions.
Any UA breaking this (even, or perhaps especially if it's MS, since
they're
big enough to have adequate personnel and resources to know better)
should
be spanked.
Otherwise, it won't get fixed.
As I remember, setting the default codepage in Windows to be ISO-8859-1
system-wide isn't that hard.
-Philip
Loren has a good point, Phillip. I happen to use Outlook Express because
I make my income, you know - what you use to eat and keep a roof over
your head, off software developed for Windows that for one reason or
another cannot be done on Linux. I telecommute. I also, if you dig deep
enough, have a Linux Kernel contribution to the 2.6 kernel tree.
It happens that I am an anti-HTML and anti-base64 bigot so I don't have
that charset issue to deal with. But if I did switch over to base 64
with character level formatting (for any reason other than posting an
accurate but unreadable white on white response to an HTML posting) I
might face that charset issue.
Please note something particularly important here, Philip. I have an
issue with RFC bigots. RFCs are *NOT* standards. They are Requests For
Comments, nothing more. When they become STANDARDS it is FAR more
critical to deal with them correctly. (If you think this particular
issue is all that critical then get in there and help make the RFC
into a standard.)
Actually, they are standards. Some are mandatory, some are elective,
some are experimental:
Network Working Group P. Prindeville
Request for Comments: 1051 McGill University
March 1988
A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams
and ARP Packets over ARCNET Networks
Status of this Memo
This RFC specifies a standard protocol for the Internet community.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
You're confusing RFC's with IDEA's, which are IETF Draft standards. We
talked about changing the names of RFC's 15 years ago to something else
just because the name is misleading... But traditional trumped rationale.
See section 2 (and sections 4.1 & 4.2 as well) of RFC-1140 if you want to
twist your head around the history:
2. The Request for Comments Documents
The documents called Request for Comments (or RFCs) are the working
notes of the "Network Working Group", that is the Internet research
and development community. A document in this series may be on
essentially any topic related to computer communication, and may be
anything from a meeting report to the specification of a standard.
Notice:
All standards are published as RFCs, but not all RFCs specify
standards.
Anyone can submit a document for publication as an RFC. Submissions
must be made via electronic mail to the RFC Editor (see the contact
information at the end of this memo).
While RFCs are not refereed publications, they do receive technical
review from the task forces, individual technical experts, or the RFC
Editor, as appropriate.
The RFC series comprises a wide range of documents such as
informational documents of general interests to specifications of
standard Internet protocols. In cases where submission is intended
to document a proposed standard, draft standard, or standard
protocol, the RFC Editor will publish the document only with the
approval of both the IESG and the IAB. For documents describing
experimental work, the RFC Editor will typically request review
comments from the relevant IETF working group or IRTF research group
and provide those comments to the author prior to committing to
publication. See Section 5.1 for more detail.
Once a document is assigned an RFC number and published, that RFC is
never revised or re-issued with the same number. There is never a
question of having the most recent version of a particular RFC.
However, a protocol (such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP)) may be
improved and re-documented many times in several different RFCs. It
is important to verify that you have the most recent RFC on a
particular protocol. This "IAB Official Protocol Standards" memo is
the reference for determining the correct RFC to refer to for the
current specification of each protocol.
I hope that makes things a little clearer.
-Philip
{^_^} Joanne being pissy this morning. (Something about eye burn
from allergies does that to me.)
I said I am being pissy. A standard is not a working document. It is a
standard. Declaring an RFC-XXX to be a standard does not make it so.
Giving it a standard number does. That would make life with pedants
a whole lot easier. In essence I made a COMMENT about a line in the
RFC that I believe is wrong and should be repaired appropriately.
(Otherwise - what in hell are the STD-XXX documents?)
{^_^}
