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rfc:bcp:bcp18

Network Working Group H. Alvestrand Request for Comments: 2277 UNINETT BCP: 18 January 1998 Category: Best Current Practice

            IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages

Status of this Memo

 This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
 Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
 improvements.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998).  All Rights Reserved.

1. Introduction

 The Internet is international.
 With the international Internet follows an absolute requirement to
 interchange data in a multiplicity of languages, which in turn
 utilize a bewildering number of characters.
 This document is the current policies being applied by the Internet
 Engineering Steering Group (IESG) towards the standardization efforts
 in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in order to help
 Internet protocols fulfill these requirements.
 The document is very much based upon the recommendations of the IAB
 Character Set Workshop of February 29-March 1, 1996, which is
 documented in RFC 2130 [WR].  This document attempts to be concise,
 explicit and clear; people wanting more background are encouraged to
 read RFC 2130.
 The document uses the terms 'MUST', 'SHOULD' and 'MAY', and their
 negatives, in the way described in [RFC 2119].  In this case, 'the
 specification' as used by RFC 2119 refers to the processing of
 protocols being submitted to the IETF standards process.

Alvestrand Best Current Practice [Page 1] RFC 2277 Charset Policy January 1998

2. Where to do internationalization

 Internationalization is for humans. This means that protocols are not
 subject to internationalization; text strings are. Where protocol
 elements look like text tokens, such as in many IETF application
 layer protocols, protocols MUST specify which parts are protocol and
 which are text. [WR 2.2.1.1]
 Names are a problem, because people feel strongly about them, many of
 them are mostly for local usage, and all of them tend to leak out of
 the local context at times. RFC 1958 [RFC 1958] recommends US-ASCII
 for all globally visible names.
 This document does not mandate a policy on name internationalization,
 but requires that all protocols describe whether names are
 internationalized or US-ASCII.
 NOTE: In the protocol stack for any given application, there is
 usually one or a few layers that need to address these problems.
 It would, for instance, not be appropriate to define language tags
 for Ethernet frames. But it is the responsibility of the WGs to
 ensure that whenever responsibility for internationalization is left
 to "another layer", those responsible for that layer are in fact
 aware that they HAVE that responsibility.

3. Definition of Terms

 This document uses the term "charset" to mean a set of rules for
 mapping from a sequence of octets to a sequence of characters, such
 as the combination of a coded character set and a character encoding
 scheme; this is also what is used as an identifier in MIME "charset="
 parameters, and registered in the IANA charset registry [REG].  (Note
 that this is NOT a term used by other standards bodies, such as ISO).
 For a definition of the term "coded character set", refer to the
 workshop report.
 A "name" is an identifier such as a person's name, a hostname, a
 domainname, a filename or an E-mail address; it is often treated as
 an identifier rather than as a piece of text, and is often used in
 protocols as an identifier for entities, without surrounding text.

3.1. What charset to use

 All protocols MUST identify, for all character data, which charset is
 in use.

Alvestrand Best Current Practice [Page 2] RFC 2277 Charset Policy January 1998

 Protocols MUST be able to use the UTF-8 charset, which consists of
 the ISO 10646 coded character set combined with the UTF-8 character
 encoding scheme, as defined in [10646] Annex R (published in
 Amendment 2), for all text.
 Protocols MAY specify, in addition, how to use other charsets or
 other character encoding schemes for ISO 10646, such as UTF-16, but
 lack of an ability to use UTF-8 is a violation of this policy; such a
 violation would need a variance procedure ([BCP9] section 9) with
 clear and solid justification in the protocol specification document
 before being entered into or advanced upon the standards track.
 For existing protocols or protocols that move data from existing
 datastores, support of other charsets, or even using a default other
 than UTF-8, may be a requirement. This is acceptable, but UTF-8
 support MUST be possible.
 When using other charsets than UTF-8, these MUST be registered in the
 IANA charset registry, if necessary by registering them when the
 protocol is published.
 (Note: ISO 10646 calls the UTF-8 CES a "Transformation Format" rather
 than a "character encoding scheme", but it fits the charset workshop
 report definition of a character encoding scheme).

3.2. How to decide a charset

 When the protocol allows a choice of multiple charsets, someone must
 make a decision on which charset to use.
 In some cases, like HTTP, there is direct or semi-direct
 communication between the producer and the consumer of data
 containing text. In such cases, it may make sense to negotiate a
 charset before sending data.
 In other cases, like E-mail or stored data, there is no such
 communication, and the best one can do is to make sure the charset is
 clearly identified with the stored data, and choosing a charset that
 is as widely known as possible.
 Note that a charset is an absolute; text that is encoded in a charset
 cannot be rendered comprehensibly without supporting that charset.
 (This also applies to English texts; charsets like EBCDIC do NOT have
 ASCII as a proper subset)

Alvestrand Best Current Practice [Page 3] RFC 2277 Charset Policy January 1998

 Negotiating a charset may be regarded as an interim mechanism that is
 to be supported until support for interchange of UTF-8 is prevalent;
 however, the timeframe of "interim" may be at least 50 years, so
 there is every reason to think of it as permanent in practice.

4. Languages

4.1. The need for language information

 All human-readable text has a language.
 Many operations, including high quality formatting, text-to-speech
 synthesis, searching, hyphenation, spellchecking and so on benefit
 greatly from access to information about the language of a piece of
 text. [WC 3.1.1.4].
 Humans have some tolerance for foreign languages, but are generally
 very unhappy with being presented text in a language they do not
 understand; this is why negotiation of language is needed.
 In most cases, machines will not be able to deduce the language of a
 transmitted text by themselves; the protocol must specify how to
 transfer the language information if it is to be available at all.
 The interaction between language and processing is complex; for
 instance, if I compare "name-of-thing(lang=en)" to "name-of-
 thing(lang=no)" for equality, I will generally expect a match, while
 the word "ask(no)" is a kind of tree, and is hardly useful as a
 command verb.

4.2. Requirement for language tagging

 Protocols that transfer text MUST provide for carrying information
 about the language of that text.
 Protocols SHOULD also provide for carrying information about the
 language of names, where appropriate.
 Note that this does NOT mean that such information must always be
 present; the requirement is that if the sender of information wishes
 to send information about the language of a text, the protocol
 provides a well-defined way to carry this information.

Alvestrand Best Current Practice [Page 4] RFC 2277 Charset Policy January 1998

4.3. How to identify a language

 The RFC 1766 language tag is at the moment the most flexible tool
 available for identifying a language; protocols SHOULD use this, or
 provide clear and solid justification for doing otherwise in the
 document.
 Note also that a language is distinct from a POSIX locale; a POSIX
 locale identifies a set of cultural conventions, which may imply a
 language (the POSIX or "C" locale of course do not), while a language
 tag as described in RFC 1766 identifies only a language.

4.4. Considerations for language negotiation

 Protocols where users have text presented to them in response to user
 actions MUST provide for support of multiple languages.
 How this is done will vary between protocols; for instance, in some
 cases, a negotiation where the client proposes a set of languages and
 the server replies with one is appropriate; in other cases, a server
 may choose to send multiple variants of a text and let the client
 pick which one to display.
 Negotiation is useful in the case where one side of the protocol
 exchange is able to present text in multiple languages to the other
 side, and the other side has a preference for one of these; the most
 common example is the text part of error responses, or Web pages that
 are available in multiple languages.
 Negotiating a language should be regarded as a permanent requirement
 of the protocol that will not go away at any time in the future.
 In many cases, it should be possible to include it as part of the
 connection establishment, together with authentication and other
 preferences negotiation.

4.5. Default Language

 When human-readable text must be presented in a context where the
 sender has no knowledge of the recipient's language preferences (such
 as login failures or E-mailed warnings, or prior to language
 negotiation), text SHOULD be presented in Default Language.
 Default Language is assigned the tag "i-default" according to the
 procedures of RFC 1766. It is not a specific language, but rather
 identifies the condition where the language preferences of the user
 cannot be established.

Alvestrand Best Current Practice [Page 5] RFC 2277 Charset Policy January 1998

 Messages in Default Language MUST be understandable by an English-
 speaking person, since English is the language which, worldwide, the
 greatest number of people will be able to get adequate help in
 interpreting when working with computers.
 Note that negotiating English is NOT the same as Default Language;
 Default Language is an emergency measure in otherwise unmanageable
 situations.
 In many cases, using only English text is reasonable; in some cases,
 the English text may be augumented by text in other languages.

5. Locale

 The POSIX standard [POSIX] defines a concept called a "locale", which
 includes a lot of information about collating order for sorting, date
 format, currency format and so on.
 In some cases, and especially with text where the user is expected to
 do processing on the text, locale information may be usefully
 attached to the text; this would identify the sender's opinion about
 appropriate rules to follow when processing the document, which the
 recipient may choose to agree with or ignore.
 This document does not require the communication of locale
 information on all text, but encourages its inclusion when
 appropriate.
 Note that language and character set information will often be
 present as parts of a locale tag (such as no_NO.iso-8859-1; the
 language is before the underscore and the character set is after the
 dot); care must be taken to define precisely which specification of
 character set and language applies to any one text item.
 The default locale is the "POSIX" locale.

6. Documenting internationalization decisions

 In documents that deal with internationalization issues at all, a
 synopsis of the approaches chosen for internationalization SHOULD be
 collected into a section called "Internationalization
 considerations", and placed next to the Security Considerations
 section.
 This provides an easy reference for those who are looking for advice
 on these issues when implementing the protocol.

Alvestrand Best Current Practice [Page 6] RFC 2277 Charset Policy January 1998

7. Security Considerations

 Apart from the fact that security warnings in a foreign language may
 cause inappropriate behaviour from the user, and the fact that
 multilingual systems usually have problems with consistency between
 language variants, no security considerations relevant have been
 identified.

8. References

 [10646]
      ISO/IEC, Information Technology - Universal Multiple-Octet Coded
      Character Set (UCS) - Part 1: Architecture and Basic
      Multilingual Plane, May 1993, with amendments
 [RFC 2119]
      Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
      Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
 [WR] Weider, C., Preston, C., Simonsen, K., Alvestrand, H,
      Atkinson, R., Crispin, M., and P. Svanberg, "The Report of the
      IAB Character Set Workshop held 29 February - 1 March, 1996",
      RFC 2130, April 1997.
 [RFC 1958]
      Carpenter, B., "Architectural Principles of the Internet", RFC
      1958, June 1996.
 [POSIX]
      ISO/IEC 9945-2:1993 Information technology -- Portable Operating
      System Interface (POSIX) -- Part 2: Shell and Utilities
 [REG]
      Freed, N., and J. Postel, "IANA Charset Registration
      Procedures", BCP 19, RFC 2278, January 1998.
 [UTF-8]
      Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646", RFC
      2279, January 1998.
 [BCP9]
      Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3," BCP
      9, RFC 2026, October 1996.

Alvestrand Best Current Practice [Page 7] RFC 2277 Charset Policy January 1998

9. Author's Address

 Harald Tveit Alvestrand
 UNINETT
 P.O.Box 6883 Elgeseter
 N-7002 TRONDHEIM
 NORWAY
 Phone: +47 73 59 70 94
 EMail: Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no

Alvestrand Best Current Practice [Page 8] RFC 2277 Charset Policy January 1998

10. Full Copyright Statement

 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998).  All Rights Reserved.
 This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
 and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
 kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of
 developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for
 copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be
 followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
 English.
 The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.
 This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
 "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
 TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
 BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION
 HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
 MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Alvestrand Best Current Practice [Page 9]

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