Subject: Protocol Action: IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages to BCP

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 11:34:19 -0500

The IESG has approved publication of the following Internet-Drafts:

 o IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages
   <draft-alvestrand-charset-policy-02.txt> for publication as a BCP.

 o IANA Charset Registration Procedure
   <draft-freed-charset-reg-04.txt> for publication as a BCP.

 o UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646
   <draft-yergeau-utf8-rev-01.txt> for publication as a Proposed Standard.

The IESG contact person is Keith Moore.

Technical Summary
 
 This set of documents specifies a consistent, useful policy for the
 IETF with regard to the use of character sets and language
 information in IETF standards.

 In particular, it specifies that protocols MUST be able to use
 the UTF-8 charset in human-readable text strings (support for
 other charsets is optional), and MUST be able to provide language
 tags for such text, in order to be successfully submitted to IETF
 standards processes without approval of a variance procedure.

Working Group Summary

 The policy has been reviewed at a special BOF at the Munich IETF
 and in numerous working groups; there seems to be rough consensus
 on the policy as stated.

 No objections were raised during IETF Last Call.

Protocol Quality

 These documents have been reviewed for the IESG by Keith Moore.

NOTE TO RFC EDITOR:
draft-yergeau-utf8-rev-01.txt contains an instance of MUST (all caps).
The IESG requests this word be lower case.