Re: ISSUE-101 (us-ascii-ref): Chairs Solicit Proposals

On 28.07.2010 11:13, Julian Reschke wrote:
>  From Boris:
>
> "I object to this on the grounds that referencing a pay-for spec for
> ASCII will essentially make the reference useless. No one is going to
> bother paying for this when free copies are so readily available. So if
> we are referencing the pay-for copy, we are effectively not helping
> people out at all."
>
> What's relevant is that we reference a document that actually is
> normative. If it is "pay-for", that's sad, but doesn't change the reality.
>
> In practice, almost all specs in the IETF cite ANSI for US-ASCII, and I
> have never seen any complaint about that, because, guess what, nobody
> needs to look it up anyway.
> ...

I also have to note that the HTML spec already has normative references 
to pay-to-read ISO specs, such as 8601 and 8859-11 (yes, that one), so 
it's entirely unclear to me where this rules come from.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Wednesday, 28 July 2010 12:58:28 UTC