Subject: [Syslog-sec] Sturctured Data & Unicode

From: "Rainer Gerhards" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:46:48 +0200

Hi list,

STRUCTURED-DATA is currently specified as All-Unicode. STRUCTURED-DATA
consists of structured data elements. Each of them consists of a name
and name-value pairs.

After going through some scenarios, I think we do NOT need to support
full Unicode in the name tags. So I propose we allow Unicode only in the
values and limit the name tags to US-ASCII. If nobody objects, I will
edit the draft in this way.

Thanks,
Rainer
_______________________________________________
Syslog-sec mailing list
[email-masked]
http://www.employees.org/mailman/listinfo/syslog-sec

---

From: "David B Harrington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:34:35 -0400

Hi,

If you are suggesting what I think you are suggesting, I disagree with
this approach.

What I hear you saying is, we will allow, say, a Japanese operator to
express **values** in a Japanese langauge, but they need to learn a
US-ASCII based language to read the **name** for the data point. This
strikes me as being rather biased in favor of people that use
languages that are US-ASCII based. It would be easier for that
Japanese operator to be able to design their name-value pairs fully in
Japanese, both name and value. 

I also don't see why such a restriction is necessary. There is no
extra cost borne by US-ASCII language based users for allowing a
Unicode format, since US-ASCII is a subset of Unicode and no extra
bits on the wire are required for their US-ASCII name-value pairs when
written in Unicode format.

If you want to ensure that IETF-STANDARD name-value pairs are
understandable to the largest community, then requiring that IETF
standards-track names be specified in US-ASCII, that would make some
sense, but I think it probably should go further and require that the
names be in English, just as it is a requirement that Internet-Drafts
and RFCs be written in English. But this should NOT mean that the name
field, if it can also contain names that are not standards-track,
should be restricted to support only US-ASCII format.

I am also a bit concerned that requiring names to only support
US-ASCII will lead implementors to only support US-ASCII for the
values as well, and that would be unfair to a large, and growing,
percentage of Internet users.

So I tend to disagree with the suggestion to limit the name to
US-ASCII.

David Harrington
[email-masked]

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Rainer
Gerhards
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2004 9:47 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [Syslog-sec] Sturctured Data & Unicode

Hi list,

After going through some scenarios, I think we do NOT need to support
full Unicode in the name tags. So I propose we allow Unicode only in
the values and limit the name tags to US-ASCII. If nobody objects, I
will edit the draft in this way.

Thanks,
Rainer