Subject: HTML5 citing RFC 1345 as normative reference for US-ASCII

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:34:39 +0100

FYI:

<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Mar/0302.html>

...I'm sure that this will come up during Last Call again.

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From: Sam Ruby <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:03:45 -0400

> ...I'm sure that this will come up during Last Call again.

This issue can be REOPENED if there is new information presented.  An 
example of such new information is listed in the email cited above.

- Sam Ruby

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:41:45 -0400

> ...I'm sure that this will come up during Last Call again.

Julian,

If you want a normative reference for ASCII, use either

	* RFC 20.  It  would be standards track except that it
	was published before the dawn of IETF time and, if the
	IESG is fussy about these things, they could upgrade it.
	
	* RFC 5198, which discusses ASCII, refers back to RFC 20
	for that definition, and is standards track already.

Note that RFC 20 is about the version of ASCII used in the
Internet and it is about ASCII only (rather than ASCII
intermixed with other CCSs and a few of Keld's opinions,
personal preferences, and a mnemonic scheme that has never taken
off.  It also doesn't actually define ASCII except by reference
to an ECMA registry, which seems a little weird.

RFC 20 actually lists the ASCII code points, which eliminates
the "for-pay spec" problem.  It doesn't do so in terms of
Unicode because, well, in 1969 there wasn't much Unicode.  RFC
5198 is written in terms of Unicode and describes the ASCII
range in terms of Unicode code points.

Put differently, while there is a problem with the Informational
status of 1345, there is a worse problem associated with the
observation that it is arguably defective and should either be
updated or moved to Historic.

Finally, the status of ECMA-6 is interesting.  It is the form
from which ISO 646 IRV was constructed, but it is not
authoritatively ASCII.  Like RFC 20, it is a copy of the ASCII
spec.  For better or worse, if one picks up a copy today, it
isn't the RFC 20 / ANSI 3.4-1968 ASCII used in the Internet but
a later version.   Worse, one cannot just reference ECMA-6: As
the second paragraph of ECMA's description (at
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-006.htm)
indicates, it has "a number of options".  Only the IRV matches
ASCII and ECMA-6 1991 IRV is somewhat different from X3.4-1968.

Just my opinion, of course.
 
   john

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From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:07:30 -0700

Reminder --

This list is for administrative discussion (mostly, scheduling calls); technical and coordination stuff needs to go to [email-masked].

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:10:20 -0400

--On Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:03 -0400 Sam Ruby
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> This issue can be REOPENED if there is new information
> presented.  An example of such new information is listed in
> the email cited above.

And, if you (collectively) decided to do so, you might consider
the note I sent a few minutes ago as "new information", since,
as far as I can tell from the poll discussion or summary, the WG
apparently did not consider use of either RFC 20 or RFC 5198 as
options.

    john

p.s.  The objective of having an authoritative definition of
ASCII that is available for free is a non-starter.  There is
only one authoritative definition and that is the one published
by the body that is now called ANSI.  That is not only
copyright-controlled and sold but the 1968 version is out of
print.  Please remember that "ASCII" is an abbreviation for
"American Standard Code for Information Interchange" not a
descriptor of a list of code points.  If you want free, stable,
and available, you are going to have to go with an authoritative
and stable copy of the code point list and whatever else you are
interested in.