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

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

HI,

Costs/interoperability -
1) first, you have to decide what character set to use and define it
   well or point to a defining document that has a cost on the order
   of US$20 or less. (And is easy to get.)
2) you have to consider how you want MIB modules using the character
   set to be encoded in 7-bit displayable ASCII when they are in
   RFCs.
3) When modules are sent via email, posted on a WEB site, or retrieved
   via FTP (ascii mode), will they be not mangled in the transfer,
   and displayable with the glyphs that the author intended?
4) when a compiler is ported from one environment to another, will
   the compiler and libraries produce the same results?
5) will I be able to use existing tools to author and process the modules?
   (tools such as sed, awk, emacs, etc)
6) will the output from the tools (and compilers) show the "right"
   text strings?

I ask these questions because I see these problems with other
documents. I'm not saying there are no benefits. It just looks
to me that the costs have not been fully disclosed. But maybe
others have already solved this problem, and can point me to
some example solutions.

Regards,
/david t. perkins