Re: comments on draft-ietf-sming-reqs-02.txt: I18n

["David T. Perkins" <dperkins@dsperkins.com>]

HI,

Let's put the language aside and ask the real question, which is
"What character set must be supported by compilers of the language?"
Supporting UTF8, or any character set other than 7-bit displayable
ASCII will cause additional work and possible interoperability 
problems. 

At 07:38 PM 7/10/2001 +0200, Frank Strauss wrote:
>Hi!
>
>>> > 71: We believe that 4.3.18 should be "nice to have". See also the
>>> >     comments in Appendix A.
>>> 
>>> [Dave] Saying Internationalization would be nice to have seems to be an
>>> innocuous change. Any objections?
>
>David> This topic has been raised multiple times in the IETF. Fred Baker made
>David> it very clear that documents must be written in English, the language of
>David> the IETF. Maybe that will change under the new leadership, but it hasn't
>David> changed yet.
>
>David> I strongly disagree with i18nized DESCRIPTIONS, or any other element of
>David> the language that could impact the interpretation of the specification. 
>
>David> There should be one and only one language that is the standard for the
>David> official specification, and the IETF has declared that English is that
>David> language. I have no objection to somebody publishing a translation into
>David> other languages, but there should only be one official specification in
>David> the one official language, in case translation creates ambiguities.
>David> Otherwise interpretation and interoperability suffer.
>
>David, please read carefully what this requirement is about. We
>absolutely agree that (a) all the SMIng documents and (b) all
>DESCRIPTIONs and other stuff in each and every IETF-defined SMIng
>module *MUST* be written in english.
>
>But we don't want to enforce a Frenchman to write his closed MIB
>modules for his closed single company in a language he does not even
>understand, if the module never gets to an IETF guy's eyes. This would
>be narrow-minded and anything else but a flexible design.
>
> -frank


Regards,
/david t. perkins