Subject: Re: [rfc-i] Unicode in xml2rfc v3

From: Martin J. Dürst <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 18:13:07 +0900

Hello John, others,

Sorry to reply on a very old thread.

On 18/12/2020 02:01, John R Levine wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Dec 2020, Lars Eggert wrote:
>> How likely is it that someone would try to actually use any of these, 
>> and if they did, someone wouldn't notice at some point and call it out?
> 
> Deliberately, pretty low, by accident due to overhelpful editing tools, 
> not all that low.
> 
>> In other words, is it really worth doing this? Or are those guardrails 
>> so simple that it's straightforward to do this?
> 
> Unicode has script rules we can point to.  We don't have to invent 
> anything.

Unicode indeed has script information. To some extent, that might sound 
easy: We allow Greek (because of the Math/Physics/... usage) but not 
e.g. Cherokee. But then, virtually every script in Unicode contains rare 
characters that you usually don't expect there (because of minority 
languages, historical use,...). And all of the punctuation and symbols 
that we may want to rely on quite a bit are in the "Common" script.

What I'd recommend to do is to give the RPC a little tool that shows all 
the non-ASCII characters with a special background color so that they 
can very quickly check what's in there (because it usually shouldn't be 
much). Having tooltips giving more character information, and with time 
building up a list of dos and donts would be the next step.

That should allow to check things with rather little overhead and 
expertise, the later always available from the authors or others if 
really necessary.

Regards,   Martin.

> Regards,
> John Levine, [email-masked], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 11:22:59 +0200

On 2021-1-11, at 11:13, Martin J. Dürst <[email-masked]> wrote:
> What I'd recommend to do is to give the RPC a little tool that shows all the non-ASCII characters with a special background color so that they can very quickly check what's in there (because it usually shouldn't be much). Having tooltips giving more character information, and with time building up a list of dos and donts would be the next step.

Like it!

Could even be an option to xml2rfc, to allow authors to verify whether any of the tools they used did weird things.

Lars

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From: Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 13:44:58 -0500

> Could even be an option to xml2rfc, to allow authors to verify whether any of the tools they used did weird things.

And/or could be part of idnits.

	Thanks,
	Paul

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 20:51:17 +0100

> And/or could be part of idnits.

It probably would help with the use of idnits if there was a way for an author to declare intentions, as in “this draft uses math”, “this draft uses typewriter quotes in sourcecode snippets only”.  Lots of heuristics, which will grow with time, but could be really useful.

Grüße, Carsten