Subject: [xml2rfc-dev] silent information loss when formatting <postal>

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 07:45:53 +0200

In v3 mode, the formatter formats postal addresses according to the
detected local of the address.

This leads to cases where information is silently dropped (such as
<region> for German addresses).

There are also cases where information is normalized (such as expanding
"USA").

In both cases, the formatter should inform the user about these
omissions/rewrites.

Best regards, Julian

PS: reported as <https://trac.tools.ietf.org/tools/xml2rfc/trac/ticket/437>

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 07:55:13 +0200

> PS: reported as <https://trac.tools.ietf.org/tools/xml2rfc/trac/ticket/437>

Related to that:
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-flanagan-7322bis-04#section-4.13> says:

>    Contact information must include a long-lived email address and
>    optionally may include a postal address and/or telephone number.  If
>    the postal address is included, it should include the country name,
>    using the English short name listed by the ISO 3166 Maintenance
>    Agency [ISO_OBP].  The purpose of this section is to (1)
>    unambiguously define author identity (e.g., the John Smith who works
>    for FooBar Systems) and (2) provide contact information for future
>    readers who have questions or comments.

I *believe* this means that expanding "USA" to "United States of
America" is incorrect. "Believe" because the citation for ISO_OPB isn't
really helpful, it goes to <https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/>, a generic ISO
search page.

Best regards, Julian

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 08:05:44 +0200

On 02.10.2019 07:55, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> There are also cases where information is normalized (such as
>> expanding "USA").
>>
>> PS: reported as
>> <https://trac.tools.ietf.org/tools/xml2rfc/trac/ticket/437>
>
> Related to that:

In the meantime I realized that "United States of America" indeed *is*
the short name; so I please ignore the above comment...

Best regards, Julian

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 14:16:36 +0200

On 02.10.2019 08:05, Julian Reschke wrote:
> ... >> Related to that:
>> ...

Here be dragons, unless I'm missing something.

According to the referenced web page, the "English short name" for
"Taiwan" is "Taiwan (Province of China)". But then see
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan%2C_China>.

Are formatters supposed to enforce this "should"? Will the RFC
Production Center enforce it?

Best regards, Julian

PS: I stumbled over this while looking for the most-used country codes
(among which is "China", and putting them into the ISO search form).