L2/00-254

August 7, 2000

B.5 IETF


B.5.1 Liaison Report [McGowan]


Here is my brief liaison report:  Patrik Fältström is the Area Director for 
Internet Applications.  We met recently at the Apple campus (WG2 Chair, UTC 
Chair, myself, and John Jenkins).  We discussed the fact that as IETF works 
increasingly on international protocols that require uses of character sets in 
language contexts, they have more of a need to either invent new standards 
(e.g., for normalization, sorting, etc.) or to reference someone else's work.  
Rather than duplicate, they want to reference Unicode technical reports.  Mark 
Davis forwarded some suitable wording as a starting point, and sent information 
regarding the various levels of tech reports, adjunct standards, etc.  IETF 
wanted more information on how we handle versioning, etc.  We explained some of 
that.  IETF wishes to avoid duplication of work, and avoid needless 
proliferation of methods that diverge only slightly from Unicode methods.  E.g., 
instead of trying to "fix" what they consider bugs in tech reports by
writing slightly different specs into RFCs, the IETF standardizers should be 
encouraged to take up the problems with UTC directly and fix them at the tech 
report level, and then write the RFCs to purely reference our work.  Patrik will 
come up with a method for referencing Unicode technical reports, and that is 
likely to become an RFC in the future.