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rfc:rfc5198

Network Working Group J. Klensin Request for Comments: 5198 M. Padlipsky Obsoletes: 698 March 2008 Updates: 854 Category: Standards Track

               Unicode Format for Network Interchange

Status of This Memo

 This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
 Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
 improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
 Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
 and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

 The Internet today is in need of a standardized form for the
 transmission of internationalized "text" information, paralleling the
 specifications for the use of ASCII that date from the early days of
 the ARPANET.  This document specifies that format, using UTF-8 with
 normalization and specific line-ending sequences.

Table of Contents

 1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  2
   1.1.  Requirement for a Standardized Text Stream Format  . . . .  2
   1.2.  Terminology  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
 2.  Net-Unicode Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
 3.  Normalization  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
 4.  Versions of Unicode  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
 5.  Applicability and Stability of this Specification  . . . . . .  7
   5.1.  Use in IETF Applications Specifications  . . . . . . . . .  7
   5.2.  Unicode Versions and Applicability . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
 6.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
 7.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
 Appendix A.  History and Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
 Appendix B.  The ASCII NVT Definition  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
 Appendix C.  The Line-Ending Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
 Appendix D.  A Note about Related Future Work  . . . . . . . . . . 14
 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
   Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
   Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 1] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

1. Introduction

1.1. Requirement for a Standardized Text Stream Format

 Historically, Internet protocols have been largely ASCII-based and
 references to "text" in protocols have assumed ASCII text and
 specifically text in Network Virtual Terminal ("NVT") or "Network
 ASCII" form (see Appendix A and Appendix B).  Protocols and formats
 that have moved beyond ASCII have included arrangements to
 specifically identify the character set and often the language being
 used.
 In our more internationalized world, "text" clearly no longer equates
 unambiguously to "network ASCII".  Fortunately, however, we are
 converging on Unicode [Unicode] [ISO10646] as a single international
 interchange character coding and no longer need to deal with per-
 script standards for character sets (e.g., one standard for each of
 Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, etc., or even standards keyed to
 languages that are usually considered to share a script, such as
 French, German, or Swedish).  Unfortunately, though, while it is
 certainly time to define a Unicode-based text type for use as a
 common text interchange format, "use Unicode" involves even more
 ambiguity than "use ASCII" did decades ago.
 Unicode identifies each character by an integer, called its "code
 point", in the range 0-0x10ffff.  These integers can be encoded into
 byte sequences for transmission in at least three standard and
 generally-recognized encoding forms, all of which are completely
 defined in The Unicode Standard and the documents cited below:
 o  UTF-8 [RFC3629] defines a variable-length encoding that may be
    applied uniformly to all code points.
 o  UTF-16 [RFC2781] encodes the range of Unicode characters whose
    code points are less than 65536 straightforwardly as 16-bit
    integers, and provides a "surrogate" mechanism for encoding larger
    code points in 32 bits.
 o  UTF-32 (also known as UCS-4) simply encodes each code point as a
    32-bit integer.
 Older forms and nomenclature, such as the 16-bit UCS-2, are now
 strongly discouraged.
 As with ASCII, any of these forms may be used with different line-
 ending conventions.  That flexibility can be an additional source of
 confusion with, e.g., index (offset) references into documents based
 on character counts.

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 2] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

 This document proposes to establish "Net-Unicode" as a new
 standardized text transmission form for the Internet, to serve as an
 internationalized alternative for NVT ASCII when specified in new --
 and, where appropriate, updated -- protocols.  UTF-8 [RFC3629] is
 chosen for the coding because it has good compatibility properties
 with ASCII and for other reasons discussed in the existing IETF
 character set policy [RFC2277].  "Net-Unicode" is specified in
 Section 2; the subsequent sections of the document provide background
 and explanation.
 Whenever there is a choice, Unicode SHOULD be used with the text
 encoding specified here.  This combination is preferred to the
 double-byte encoding of "extended ASCII" [RFC0698] or the assorted
 per-language or per-country character coding systems.

1.2. Terminology

 The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
 "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
 document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

2. Net-Unicode Definition

 The Network Unicode format (Net-Unicode) is defined as follows.
 Parts of this definition are deliberately informal, providing
 guidance for specific profiles or rules in the protocols that
 reference this one rather than firm rules that apply globally.
 1.  Characters MUST be encoded in UTF-8 as defined in [RFC3629].
 2.  If the protocol has the concept of "lines", line-endings MUST be
     indicated by the sequence Carriage-Return (CR, U+000D) followed
     by Line-Feed (LF, U+000A), often known just as CRLF.  CR SHOULD
     NOT appear except when followed by LF.  The only other allowed
     context in which CR is permitted is in the combination CR NUL,
     which is not recommended (see the note at the end of this
     section).
 3.  The control characters in the ASCII range (U+0000 to U+001F and
     U+007F to U+009F) SHOULD generally be avoided.  Space (SP,
     U+0020), CR, LF, and Form Feed (FF, U+000C) are exceptions to
     this principle, but use of all but the first requires care as
     discussed elsewhere in this document.  The so-called "C1
     Controls" (U+0080 through U+009F), which did not appear in ASCII,
     MUST NOT appear.
     FF should be used only with caution: it does not have a standard
     and universal interpretation and, in particular, if its use

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 3] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

     assumes a page length, such assumptions may not be appropriate in
     international contexts (e.g., considering 8.5x11 inch paper
     versus A4).  Other control characters are used to affect display
     format, control devices, or to structure files.  None of those
     uses is appropriate for streams of plain text.
 4.  Before transmission, all character sequences SHOULD be normalized
     according to Unicode normalization form "NFC" (see Section 3).
 5.  As suggested in Section 6 of RFC 3629, the Byte Order Mark
     ("BOM") signature MUST NOT appear at the beginning of these text
     strings.
 6.  Systems conforming to this specification MUST NOT transmit any
     string containing any code point that is unassigned in the
     version of Unicode on which they are dependent.  The version of
     NFC and the version of Unicode used by that system MUST be
     consistent.
 The use of LF without CR is questionable; see Appendix B for more
 discussion.  The newer control characters IND (U+0084) and NEL ("Next
 Line", U+0085) might have been used to disambiguate the various line-
 ending situations, but, because their use has not been established on
 the Internet, because many protocols require CRLF, and because IND
 and NEL fall within the "C1 Controls" group (see below), they MUST
 NOT be used.  Similar observations apply to the yet newer line and
 paragraph separators at U+2028 and U+2029 and any future characters
 that might be defined to serve these functions.  For this
 specification and protocols that depend on it, lines end in CRLF and
 only in CRLF.  Anything that does not end in CRLF is either not a
 line or is severely malformed.
 The NVT specification contained a number of additional provisions,
 e.g., for the optional use of backspacing and "bare CR" (sent as CR
 NUL) to generate overstruck character sequences.  The much greater
 number of precomposed characters in Unicode, the availability of
 combining characters, and the growing use of markup conventions of
 various types to show, e.g., emphasis (rather than attempting to do
 that via the use of special characters), should make such sequences
 largely unnecessary.  These sequences SHOULD be avoided if at all
 possible.  However, because they were optional in NVT applications
 and this specification is an NVT superset, they cannot be prohibited
 entirely.  The most important of these rules is that CR MUST NOT
 appear unless it is immediately followed by LF (indicating end of
 line) or NUL.  Because NUL (an octet whose value is all zeros, i.e.,
 %x00 in the notation of [RFC5234]) is hostile to programming
 languages that use that character as a string delimiter, the CR NUL
 sequence SHOULD be avoided for that reason as well.

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 4] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

3. Normalization

 There are cases where strings of Unicode are fundamentally
 equivalent, essentially representing the same text.  These are called
 "canonical equivalents" in the Unicode Standard.  For example, the
 following pairs of strings are canonically equivalent:
 U+2126 OHM SIGN
 U+03A9 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA
 U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A, U+0300 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT
 U+00E0 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE
 Comparison of strings becomes much easier if any such cases are
 always represented by a single unique form.  The Unicode Consortium
 specifies a normalization form, known as NFC [NFC], which provides
 the necessary mappings and mechanisms to convert all canonically
 equivalent sequences to a single unique form.  Typically, this form
 produces precomposed characters for any sequences that can be
 represented in that fashion.  It also reorders other combining marks
 so that they have a unique and unambiguous order.
 Of the various normalization forms defined as part of Unicode, NFC is
 closest to actual use in practice, minimizes side-effects due to
 considering characters equivalent that may not be equivalent in all
 situations, and typically requires the least work when converting
 from non-Unicode encodings.
 The section above requires that, except in very unusual
 circumstances, all Net-Unicode strings be transmitted in normalized
 form.  Recognition of the fact that some implementations of
 applications may rely on operating system libraries over which they
 have little control and adherence to the robustness principle
 suggests that receivers of such strings should be prepared to receive
 unnormalized ones and to not react to that in excessive ways.

4. Versions of Unicode

 Unicode changes and expands over time.  Large blocks of space are
 reserved for future expansion.  New versions, which appear at regular
 intervals, add new scripts and characters.  Occasionally they also
 change some property definitions.  In retrospect, one of the
 advantages of ASCII [ASCII] when it was chosen was that the code
 space was full when the Standard was first published.  There was no
 practical way to add characters or change code point assignments
 without being obviously incompatible.

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 5] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

 While there are some security issues if people deliberately try to
 trick the system (see Section 6), Unicode version changes should not
 have a significant impact on the text stream specification of this
 document for the following reasons:
 o  The transformation between Unicode code table positions and the
    corresponding UTF-8 code is algorithmic; it does not depend on
    whether a code point has been assigned or not.
 o  The normalization recommended here, NFC (see Section 3), performs
    a very limited set of mappings, much more limited than those of
    the more extensive NFKC used in, e.g., Nameprep [RFC3491].
 The NFC tables may be updated over time as new characters are added,
 but the Unicode Consortium has guaranteed the stability of all NFC
 strings.  That is, if a string does not contain any unassigned
 characters, and it is normalized according to NFC, it will always be
 normalized according to all future versions of the Unicode Standard.
 The stability of the Net-Unicode format is thus guaranteed when any
 implementation that converts text into Net-Unicode format does not
 permit unassigned characters.
 Because Unicode code points that are reserved for private use do not
 have standard definitions or normalization interpretations, they
 SHOULD be avoided in strings intended for Internet interchange.
 Were Unicode to be changed in a way that violated these assumptions,
 i.e., that either invalidated the byte string order specified in RFC
 3629 or that changed the stability of NFC as stated above, this
 specification would not apply.  Put differently, this specification
 applies only to versions of Unicode starting with version 5.0 and
 extending to, but not including, any version for which changes are
 made in either the UTF-8 definition or to NFC stability.  Such
 changes would violate established Unicode policies and are hence
 unlikely, but, should they occur, it would be necessary to evaluate
 them for compatibility with this specification and other Internet
 uses of NFC.
 If the specification of a protocol references this one, strings that
 are received by that protocol and that appear to be UTF-8 and are not
 otherwise identified (e.g., by charset labeling) SHOULD be treated as
 using UTF-8 in conformance with this specification.

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 6] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

5. Applicability and Stability of this Specification

5.1. Use in IETF Applications Specifications

 During the development of this specification, there was some
 confusion about where it would be useful given that, e.g., the
 individual MIME media types used in email and with HTTP have their
 own rules about UTF-8 character types and normalization, and the
 application transport protocols impose their own conventions about
 line endings.  There are three answers.  The first is that, in
 retrospect, it would have been better to have those protocols and
 content types standardized in the way specified here, even though it
 is certainly too late to change them at this time.  The second is
 that we have several protocols that are dependent on either the
 original Telnet design or other arrangements requiring a standard,
 interoperable, string definition without specific content-labels of
 one sort or another.  Whois [RFC3912] is an example member of this
 group.  As consideration is given to upgrading them for non-ASCII
 use, this specification provides a normative reference that provides
 the same stability that NVT has provided the ASCII forms.  This
 specification is intended for use by other specifications that have
 not yet defined how to use Unicode.  Having a preferred standard
 Internet definition for Unicode text streams -- rather than just one
 for transmission codings -- may help improve the specification and
 interoperability of protocols to be developed in the future.  This
 specification is not intended for use with specifications that
 already allow the use of UTF-8 and precisely define that use.

5.2. Unicode Versions and Applicability

 The IETF faces a practical dilemma with regard to versions of
 Unicode.  Each new version brings with it new characters and
 sometimes new combining characters.  Version 5.0 introduces the new
 concept of sequences of characters named as if they were individual
 characters (see [NamedSequences]).  The normalization represented by
 NFC is stable if all strings are transmitted and stored in normalized
 form if corrections are never made to character definitions or
 normalization tables and if unassigned code points are never used.
 The latter is important because an unassigned code point always
 normalizes to itself.  However, if the same code point is assigned to
 a character in a future version, it may participate in some other
 normalization mapping (some specific difficulties in this regard are
 discussed in [RFC4690]).  It is worth noting that transmission in
 normalized form is not required by either the IETF's UTF-8 Standard
 [RFC3629] or by standards dependent on the current version of
 Stringprep [RFC3454].

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 7] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

 All would be well with this as described in Section 4 except for one
 problem: Applications typically do not perform their own conversions
 to Unicode and may not perform their own normalizations but instead
 rely on operating system or language library functions -- functions
 that may be upgraded or otherwise changed without changes to the
 application code itself.  Consequently, there may be no plausible way
 for an application to know which version of Unicode, or which version
 of the normalization procedures, it is utilizing, nor is there any
 way by which it can guarantee that the two will be consistent.
 Because of per-version changes in definitions and tables, Stringprep
 and documents depending on it are now tied to Unicode Version 3.2
 [Unicode32] and full interoperability of Internet Standard UTF-8
 [RFC3629], when used with normalization as specified here, is
 dependent on normalization definitions and the definition of UTF-8
 itself not changing after Unicode Version 5.0.  These assumptions
 seem fairly safe, but they are still assumptions.  Rather than being
 linked to the latest available version of Unicode, version 5.0
 [Unicode] or broader concepts of version independence based on
 specific assumptions and conditions, this specification could
 reasonably have been tied, like Stringprep and Nameprep to Unicode
 3.2 [Unicode32] or some more recent intermediate version, but, in
 addition to the obvious disadvantages of having different IETF
 standards tied to different versions of Unicode, the library-based
 application implementation behavior described above makes these
 version linkages nearly meaningless in practice.
 In theory, one can get around this problem in four ways:
 1.  Freeze on a particular version of Unicode and try to insist that
     applications enforce that version by, e.g., containing lists of
     unassigned characters and prohibiting their use.  Of course, this
     would prohibit evolution to include newly-added scripts and the
     tables of unassigned code points would be cumbersome.
 2.  Require that every Unicode "text" string or file start with a
     version indication, somewhat akin to the "byte order mark"
     indicator.  It is unlikely that this provision would be
     practical.  More important, it would require that each
     application implementation be prepared to either support multiple
     normalization tables and versions or that it reject text from
     Unicode versions with which it was not prepared to deal.
 3.  Devise a different set of normalization rules that would, e.g.,
     guarantee that no character assigned to a previously-unassigned
     code point in Unicode was ever normalized to anything but itself
     and use those rules instead of NFC.  It is not clear whether or
     not such a set of rules is possible or whether some other

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 8] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

     completely stable set of rules could be devised, perhaps in
     combination with restrictions on the ways in which characters
     were added in future versions of Unicode.
 4.  Devise a normalization process that is otherwise equivalent to
     NFC but that rejects code points that are unassigned in the
     current version of Unicode, rather than mapping those code points
     to themselves.  This would still leave some risk of incompatible
     corrections in Unicode and possibly a few edge cases, but it is
     probably stable enough for Internet use in the overwhelming
     number of cases.  This process has been discussed in the Unicode
     Consortium under the name "Stable NFC".
 None of these approaches seems ideal: the ideal procedure would be as
 stable and predictable as ASCII has been.  But that level is simply
 not feasible as long as Unicode continues to evolve by the addition
 of new code points and scripts.  The fourth option listed above
 appears to be a reasonable compromise.

6. Security Considerations

 This specification provides a standard form for the use of Unicode as
 "network text".  Most of the same security issues that apply to
 UTF-8, as discussed in [RFC3629], apply to it, although it should be
 slightly less subject to some risks by virtue of requiring NFC
 normalization and generally being somewhat more restrictive.
 However, shifts in Unicode versions, as discussed in Section 5.2, may
 introduce other security issues.
 Programs that receive these streams should use extreme caution about
 assuming that incoming data are normalized, since it might be
 possible to use unnormalized forms, as well as invalid UTF-8, as part
 of an attack.  In particular, firewalls and other systems that
 interpret UTF-8 streams should be developed with the clear knowledge
 that an attacker may deliberately send unnormalized text, for
 instance, to avoid detection by naive text-matching systems.
 NVT contains a requirement, of necessity repeated here (see
 Section 2), that the CR character be immediately followed by either
 LF or ASCII NUL (an octet with all bits zero).  NUL may be
 problematic for some programming languages that use it as a string
 terminator, and hence a trap for the unwary, unless caution is used.
 This may be an additional reason to avoid the use of CR entirely,
 except in sequence with LF, as suggested above.
 The discussion about Unicode versions above (see Section 4 and
 Section 5.2) makes several assumptions about future versions of
 Unicode, about NFC normalization being applied properly, and about

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 9] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

 UTF-8 being processed and transmitted exactly as specified in RFC
 3629.  If any of those assumptions are not correct, then there are
 cases in which strings that would be considered equivalent do not
 compare equal.  Robust code should be prepared for those
 possibilities.

7. Acknowledgments

 Many thanks to Mark Davis, Martin Duerst, and Michel Suignard for
 suggestions about Unicode normalization that led to the format
 described here, and especially to Mark for providing the paragraphs
 that describe the role of NFC.  Thanks also to Mark, Doug Ewell,
 Asmus Freytag for corrected text describing Unicode transmission
 forms, and to Tim Bray, Carsten Bormann, Stephane Bortzmeyer, Martin
 Duerst, Frank Ellermann, Clive D.W. Feather, Ted Hardie, Bjoern
 Hoehrmann, Alfred Hoenes, Kent Karlsson, Bill McQuillan, George
 Michaelson, Chris Newman, and Marcos Sanz for a number of helpful
 comments and clarification requests.

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 10] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

Appendix A. History and Context

 This subsection contains a review of prior work in the ARPANET and
 Internet to establish a standard text type, work that establishes the
 context and motivation for the approach taken in this document.  The
 text is explanatory rather than normative: nothing in this section is
 intended to change or update any current specification.  Those who
 are uninterested in this review and analysis can safely skip this
 section.
 One of the earlier application design decisions made in the
 development of ARPANET, a decision that was carried forward into the
 Internet, was the decision to standardize on a single and very
 specific coding for "text" to be passed across the network [RFC0020].
 Hosts on the network were then responsible for translating or mapping
 from whatever character coding conventions were used locally to that
 common intermediate representation, with sending hosts mapping to it
 and receiving ones mapping from it to their local forms as needed.
 It is interesting to note that at the time the ARPANET was being
 developed, participating host operating systems used at least three
 different character coding standards: the antiquated BCD (Binary
 Coded Decimal), the then-dominant major manufacturer-backed EBCDIC
 (Extended BCD Interchange Code), and the then-still emerging ASCII
 (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).  Since the
 ARPANET was an "open" project and EBCDIC was intimately linked to a
 particular hardware vendor, the original Network Working Group agreed
 that its standard should be ASCII.  That ASCII form was precisely
 "7-bit ASCII in an 8-bit field", which was in effect a compromise
 between hosts that were natively 7-bit oriented (e.g., with five
 seven-bit characters in a 36-bit word), those that were 8-bit
 oriented (using eight-bit characters) and those that placed the
 seven-bit ASCII characters in 9-bit fields with two leading zero bits
 (four characters in a 36-bit word).
 More standardization was suggested in the first preliminary
 description of the Telnet protocol [RFC0097].  With the iterations of
 that protocol [RFC0137] [RFC0139] and the drawing together of an
 essentially formal definition somewhat later [RFC0318], a standard
 abstraction, the Network Virtual Terminal (NVT) was established.  NVT
 character-coding conventions (initially called "Telnet ASCII" and
 later called "NVT ASCII", or, more casually, "network ASCII")
 included the requirement that Carriage Return followed by Line Feed
 (CRLF) be the common representation for ending lines of text (given
 that some participating "Host" operating systems used the one
 natively, some the other, at least one used both, and a few used
 neither (preferring variable-length lines with counts or special
 delimiters or markers instead) and specified conventions for some
 other characters.  Also, since NVT ASCII was restricted to seven-bit

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 11] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

 characters, use of the high-order bit in octets was reserved for the
 transmission of control signaling information.
 At a very high level, the concept was that a system could use
 whatever character coding and line representations were appropriate
 locally, but text transmitted over the network as text must conform
 to the single "network virtual terminal" convention.  Virtually all
 early Internet protocols that presume transfer of "text" assume this
 virtual terminal model, although different ones assume or limit it in
 different ways.  Telnet, the command stream and ASCII Type in FTP
 [RFC0542], the message stream in SMTP transfer [RFC2821], and the
 strings passed to finger [RFC0742] and whois [RFC0954] are the
 classic examples.  More recently, HTTP [RFC1945] [RFC2616] follows
 the same general model but permits 8-bit data and leaves the line end
 sequence unspecified (the latter has been the source of a significant
 number of problems).

Appendix B. The ASCII NVT Definition

 The main body of this specification is intended as an update to, and
 internationalized version of, the Net-ASCII definition.  The
 specification is self-contained in that parts of the Net-ASCII
 definition that are no longer recommended are not included above.
 Because Net-ASCII evolved somewhat over time and there has been
 debate about which specification is the "official" Net-ASCII, it is
 appropriate to review the key elements of that definition here.  This
 review is informal with regard to the contents of Net-ASCII and
 should not be considered as a normative update or summary of the
 earlier specifications (Section 2 does specify some normative updates
 to those specifications and some comments below are consistent with
 it).
 The first part of the section titled "THE NVT PRINTER AND KEYBOARD"
 in RFC 854 [RFC0854] is generally, although not universally,
 considered to be the normative definition of the (ASCII) Network
 Virtual Terminal and hence of Net-ASCII.  It includes not only the
 graphic ASCII characters but a number of control characters.  The
 latter are given Internet-specific meanings that are often more
 specific than the definitions in the ASCII specification.  In today's
 usage, and for the present specification, the following
 clarifications and updates to that list should be noted.  Each one is
 accompanied by a brief explanation of the reason why the original
 specification is no longer appropriate.
 1.  The "defined but not required" codes -- BEL (U+0007), BS
     (U+0008), HT (U+0009), VT (U+000B), and FF (U+000C) -- and the
     undefined control codes ("C0") SHOULD NOT be used unless required
     by exceptional circumstances.  Either their original "network

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 12] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

     printer" definitions are no longer in general use, common
     practice has evolved away from the formats specified there, or
     their use to simulate characters that are better handled by
     Unicode is no longer appropriate.  While the appearance of some
     of these characters on the list may seem surprising, BS now has
     an ambiguous interpretation in practice (erasing in some systems
     but not in others), the width associated with HT varies with the
     environment, and VT and FF do not have a uniform effect with
     regard to either vertical positioning or the associated
     horizontal position result.  Of course, telnet escapes are not
     considered part of the data stream and hence are unaffected by
     this provision.
 2.  In Net-ASCII, CR MUST NOT appear except when immediately followed
     by either NUL or LF, with the latter (CR LF) designating the "new
     line" function.  Today and as specified above, CR should
     generally appear only when followed by LF.  Because page layout
     is better done in other ways, because NUL has a special
     interpretation in some programming languages, and to avoid other
     types of confusion, CR NUL should preferably be avoided as
     specified above.
 3.  LF CR SHOULD NOT appear except as a side-effect of multiple CR LF
     sequences (e.g., CR LF CR LF).
 4.  The historical NVT documents do not call out either "bare LF" (LF
     without CR) or HT for special treatment.  Both have generally
     been understood to be problematic.  In the case of LF, there is a
     difference in interpretation as to whether its semantics imply
     "go to same position on the next line" or "go to the first
     position on the next line" and interoperability considerations
     suggest not depending on which interpretation the receiver
     applies.  At the same time, misinterpretation of LF is less
     harmful than misinterpretation of "bare" CR: in the CR case, text
     may be erased or made completely unreadable; in the LF one, the
     worst consequence is a very funny-looking display.  Obviously, HT
     is problematic because there is no standard way to transmit
     intended tab position or width information in running text.
     Again, the harm is unlikely to be great if HT is simply
     interpreted as one or more spaces, but, in general, it cannot be
     relied upon to format information.
 It is worth noting that the telnet IAC character (an octet consisting
 of all ones, i.e., %xFF) itself is not a problem for UTF-8 since that
 particular octet cannot appear in a valid UTF-8 string.  However,
 while few of them have been used, telnet permits other command-
 introducer characters whose bit sequences in an octet may be part of
 valid UTF-8 characters.  While it causes no ambiguity in UTF-8,

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 13] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

 Unicode assigns a graphic character ("Latin Small Letter Y with
 Diaeresis") to U+00FF (octets C3 B0 in UTF-8).  Some caution is
 clearly in order in this area.

Appendix C. The Line-Ending Problem

 The definition of how a line ending should be denoted in plain text
 strings on the wire for the Internet has been controversial from even
 before the introduction of NVT.  Some have argued that recipients
 should be required to interpret almost anything that a sender might
 intend as a line ending as actually a line ending.  Others have
 pointed out that this would lead to some ambiguities of
 interpretation and presentation and would violate the principle that
 we should minimize the number of forms that are permitted on the wire
 in order to promote interoperability and eliminate the "every
 recipient needs to understand every sender format" problem.  The
 design of this specification, like that of NVT, takes the latter
 approach.  Its designers believe that there is little point in a
 standard if it is to specify "anyone can do whatever they like and
 the receiver just needs to cope".
 A further discussion of the nature and evolution of the line-ending
 problem appears in Section 5.8 of the Unicode Standard [Unicode] and
 is suggested for additional reading.  If we were starting with the
 Internet today, it would probably be sensible to follow the
 recommendation there and use LS (U+2028) exclusively, in preference
 to CRLF.  However, the installed base of use of CRLF and the
 importance of forward compatibility with NVT and protocols that
 assume it makes that impossible, so it is necessary to continue using
 CRLF as the "New Line Function" ("NLF", see the terminology section
 in that reference).

Appendix D. A Note about Related Future Work

 Consideration should be given to a Telnet (or SSH [RFC4251]) option
 to specify this type of stream and an FTP extension [RFC0959] to
 permit a new "Unicode text" data TYPE.

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 14] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

References

Normative References

 [ISO10646]        International Organization for Standardization,
                   "Information Technology - Universal Multiple-Octet
                   Coded Character Set (UCS) - Part 1: Architecture
                   and Basic Multilingual Plane", ISO/
                   IEC 10646-1:2000, October 2000.
 [NFC]             Davis, M. and M. Duerst, "Unicode Standard Annex
                   #15: Unicode Normalization Forms", October 2006,
                   <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/>.
 [RFC2119]         Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
                   Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
 [RFC3629]         Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO
                   10646", STD 63, RFC 3629, November 2003.
 [RFC5234]         Crocker, D. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for
                   Syntax Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234,
                   January 2008.
 [Unicode]         The Unicode Consortium, "The Unicode Standard,
                   Version 5.0", 2007.
                   Boston, MA, USA: Addison-Wesley.  ISBN
                   0-321-48091-0
 [Unicode32]       The Unicode Consortium, "The Unicode Standard,
                   Version 3.0", 2000.
                   (Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 2000.  ISBN 0-201-
                   61633-5).  Version 3.2 consists of the definition
                   in that book as amended by the Unicode Standard
                   Annex #27: Unicode 3.1
                   (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr27/) and by the
                   Unicode Standard Annex #28: Unicode 3.2
                   (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr28/).

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 15] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

Informative References

 [ASCII]           American National Standards Institute (formerly
                   United States of America Standards Institute), "USA
                   Code for Information Interchange", ANSI X3.4-1968,
                   1968.
                   ANSI X3.4-1968 has been replaced by newer versions
                   with slight modifications, but the 1968 version
                   remains definitive for the Internet.  ISO 646
                   International Reverence Version (IRV)
                   [ISO.646.1991] is usually considered equivalent to
                   ASCII.
 [ISO.646.1991]    International Organization for Standardization,
                   "Information technology - ISO 7-bit coded character
                   set for information interchange", ISO Standard 646,
                   1991.
 [NamedSequences]  The Unicode Consortium, "NamedSequences-4.1.0.txt",
                   2005, <http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/
                   NamedSequences.txt>.
 [RFC0020]         Cerf, V., "ASCII format for network interchange",
                   RFC 20, October 1969.
 [RFC0097]         Melvin, J. and R. Watson, "First Cut at a Proposed
                   Telnet Protocol", RFC 97, February 1971.
 [RFC0137]         O'Sullivan, T., "Telnet Protocol - a proposed
                   document", RFC 137, April 1971.
 [RFC0139]         O'Sullivan, T., "Discussion of Telnet Protocol",
                   RFC 139, May 1971.
 [RFC0318]         Postel, J., "Telnet Protocols", RFC 318,
                   April 1972.
 [RFC0542]         Neigus, N., "File Transfer Protocol", RFC 542,
                   August 1973.
 [RFC0698]         Mock, T., "Telnet extended ASCII option", RFC 698,
                   July 1975.
 [RFC0742]         Harrenstien, K., "NAME/FINGER Protocol", RFC 742,
                   December 1977.

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 16] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

 [RFC0854]         Postel, J. and J. Reynolds, "Telnet Protocol
                   Specification", STD 8, RFC 854, May 1983.
 [RFC0954]         Harrenstien, K., Stahl, M., and E. Feinler,
                   "NICNAME/WHOIS", RFC 954, October 1985.
 [RFC0959]         Postel, J. and J. Reynolds, "File Transfer
                   Protocol", STD 9, RFC 959, October 1985.
 [RFC1945]         Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and H. Nielsen,
                   "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0",
                   RFC 1945, May 1996.
 [RFC2277]         Alvestrand, H., "IETF Policy on Character Sets and
                   Languages", BCP 18, RFC 2277, January 1998.
 [RFC2616]         Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H.,
                   Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee,
                   "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1",
                   RFC 2616, June 1999.
 [RFC2781]         Hoffman, P. and F. Yergeau, "UTF-16, an encoding of
                   ISO 10646", RFC 2781, February 2000.
 [RFC2821]         Klensin, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol",
                   RFC 2821, April 2001.
 [RFC3454]         Hoffman, P. and M. Blanchet, "Preparation of
                   Internationalized Strings ("stringprep")",
                   RFC 3454, December 2002.
 [RFC3491]         Hoffman, P. and M. Blanchet, "Nameprep: A
                   Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain
                   Names (IDN)", RFC 3491, March 2003.
 [RFC3912]         Daigle, L., "WHOIS Protocol Specification",
                   RFC 3912, September 2004.
 [RFC4251]         Ylonen, T. and C. Lonvick, "The Secure Shell (SSH)
                   Protocol Architecture", RFC 4251, January 2006.
 [RFC4690]         Klensin, J., Faltstrom, P., Karp, C., and IAB,
                   "Review and Recommendations for Internationalized
                   Domain Names (IDNs)", RFC 4690, September 2006.

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 17] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

Authors' Addresses

 John C Klensin
 1770 Massachusetts Ave, #322
 Cambridge, MA  02140
 USA
 Phone: +1 617 491 5735
 EMail: john-ietf@jck.com
 Michael A. Padlipsky
 8011 Stewart Ave.
 Los Angeles, CA  90045
 USA
 Phone: +1 310-670-4288
 EMail: the.map@alum.mit.edu

Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 18] RFC 5198 Network Unicode March 2008

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Klensin & Padlipsky Standards Track [Page 19]

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