The POSIX standard [POSIX] defines a concept called a "locale", which
   includes a lot of information about collating order for sorting, date
   format, currency format and so on.

   In some cases, and especially with text where the user is expected to
   do processing on the text, locale information may be usefully
   attached to the text; this would identify the sender's opinion about
   appropriate rules to follow when processing the document, which the
   recipient may choose to agree with or ignore.

   This document does not require the communication of locale
   information on all text, but encourages its inclusion when
   appropriate.

   Note that language and character set information will often be
   present as parts of a locale tag (such as no_NO.iso-8859-1; the
   language is before the underscore and the character set is after the
   dot); care must be taken to define precisely which specification of
   character set and language applies to any one text item.

   The default locale is the "POSIX" locale.

6.  Documenting internationalization decisions

   In documents that deal with internationalization issues at all, a
   synopsis of the approaches chosen for internationalization SHOULD be
   collected into a section called "Internationalization
   considerations", and placed next to the Security Considerations
   section.

   This provides an easy reference for those who are looking for advice
   on these issues when implementing the protocol.






 
RFC 2277                     Charset Policy                 January 1998


7.  Security Considerations

   Apart from the fact that security warnings in a foreign language may
   cause inappropriate behaviour from the user, and the fact that
   multilingual systems usually have problems with consistency between
   language variants, no security considerations relevant have been
   identified.

8.  References

   [10646]
        ISO/IEC, Information Technology - Universal Multiple-Octet Coded
        Character Set (UCS) - Part 1: Architecture and Basic
        Multilingual Plane, May 1993, with amendments

   [RFC 2119]
        Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
        Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [WR] Weider, C., Preston, C., Simonsen, K., Alvestrand, H,
        Atkinson, R., Crispin, M., and P. Svanberg, "The Report of the
        IAB Character Set Workshop held 29 February - 1 March, 1996",
        RFC 2130, April 1997.

   [RFC 1958]
        Carpenter, B., "Architectural Principles of the Internet", RFC
        1958, June 1996.

   [POSIX]
        ISO/IEC 9945-2:1993 Information technology -- Portable Operating
        System Interface (POSIX) -- Part 2: Shell and Utilities

   [REG]
        Freed, N., and J. Postel, "IANA Charset Registration
        Procedures", BCP 19, RFC 2278, January 1998.

   [UTF-8]
        Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646", RFC
        2279, January 1998.

   [BCP9]
        Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3," BCP
        9, RFC 2026, October 1996.









 
RFC 2277                     Charset Policy                 January 1998


9.  Author's Address