Subject: Re: [rfc-i] [Tools-discuss] <contact/>: asciiFullname should be latinFullname

From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 Oct 2020 16:40:13 -0400

In article <[email-masked]> you write:
>[I was really trying to send this to rfc-interest, but that doesn’t seem to take.]

Moved there now.

>foo.xml(76): Error: Found non-ascii content in <contact> attribute value asciiFullname="Toyota Jidōsha KK"
>
>Why do we allow Latin names in contact names, but if we have a non-Latin name, then the transcription suddenly needs to be
>ASCII, not just Latin?

Because the <contact/> element was added to the grammar without any 
review. We don't know whether it's for ASCII versions of non-ASCII names, 
Latin versions of non-Latin names, or tagging every time a person's name 
appears. The RSOC is setting up a small ad-hoc group to review XML changs 
and I'll put this on the list. Until we do, please do not make any changes 
to what it does, even if that currently seems wrong.

Looking at RFC 7997, when it says ASCII, it really means ASCII. At the 
time there were still some systems that only spoke ASCII, and more 
importantly tools like grep that only worked with single-byte characters. 
In retrospect, that was a mistake since every current display device can 
display anything, and text handling software now deals with locales and 
UTF-8 pretty well.

I think we should update 7997 to say that Unicode is allowed anywhere it 
visually makes sense, and the style guide can say what to do with 
non-Latin names, but again it's not something we can do unilaterally.

R's,
John
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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2020 00:31:17 +0200

Hi John,

good to know that this is now in a pipeline somewhere where it will be acted upon.
I don’t need a resolution now; so I’m looking forward to hear in time what happened to it.

Grüße, Carsten

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2020 07:58:31 +0200

Am 07.10.2020 um 22:40 schrieb John R Levine:
>> Why do we allow Latin names in contact names, but if we have a
>> non-Latin name, then the transcription suddenly needs to be
>> ASCII, not just Latin?
>
> review. We don't know whether it's for ASCII versions of non-ASCII

It was *originally* added as block-level element that has the same
content model as <author>, and could be used anywhere in the document in
order to format contact information similar to the way author
information is formatted (at the document end). This addressed an
age-old feature request ("how do I format Acknowledgements?"), and I
think this is good.

What's problematic is the re-use as inline document, addressing a
problem (over-constrainedness of allowed characters) we shouldn't have
in the first place.

> ...
> importantly tools like grep that only worked with single-byte
> characters. In retrospect, that was a mistake since every current
> display device can display anything, and text handling software now
> deals with locales and UTF-8 pretty well.
>

+1

Best regards, Julian