OT: french orthography (was RE: BCP47 Appeals process)

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 07:31:16AM -0700,
 Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com> wrote 
 a message of 24 lines which said:

> The Internet does not prevent the use of any character used in
> French orthography

I may agree or disagree with you, depending on the meaning of "the
Internet". The typical IETF participant will notice that IP (wether v4
or v6) is completely neutral with regard to the content and therefore
with regard to the character set used and so will say that the "The
Internet does not prevent the use of any character".

But the regular user may consider that "the Internet" is not just
layer 3, it is a bunch of application protocols, and many of them
were ASCII-only. For instance, accented characters in email addresses
are permitted in IETF standards for only one week :-) RFC 5335

Also, even when the standards are fully Unicode for several years,
there are some corner cases where accented characters are molested by
a broken implementation, or by lack of deployment (a concern for IDN).

So, the regular user may have the right to say that the whole Internet
suite is not yet perfectly 100 % Unicode-aware.