Network Working Group G. Zorn Request for Comments: 2484 Microsoft Corporation Category: Standards Track January 1999 Updates: 2284, 1994, 1570
PPP LCP Internationalization Configuration Option
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) [1] provides a standard method for transporting multi-protocol datagrams over point-to-point links. PPP also defines an extensible Link Control Protocol (LCP), which allows negotiation of an Authentication Protocol for authenticating its peer before allowing Network Layer protocols to transmit over the link.
Both LCP and Authentication Protocol packets may contain text which is intended to be human-readable [2,3,4]. This document defines an LCP configuration option for the negotiation of character set and language usage, as required by RFC 2277 [5].
In this document, the key words "MAY", "MUST, "MUST NOT", "optional", "recommended", "SHOULD", and "SHOULD NOT" are to be interpreted as described in [6].
The Internationalization option described here MAY be negotiated independently in each direction.
Only one instance of this option SHOULD be sent by an implementation, representing its preferred language and charset.
If Internationalization option is rejected by the peer, the default language and charset MUST be used to construct all human-readable messages sent to the peer.
This Configuration Option provides a method for an implementation to indicate to the peer both the language in which human-readable messages it sends should be composed and the charset in which that language should be represented.
A summary of the Internationalization option format is shown below. The fields are transmitted from left to right.
RFC 2484 LCP Internationalization Option January 1999
MIBenum
The MIBenum field is four octets in length. It contains a unique integer value identifying a charset [5,11].
This value MUST represent one of the set of charsets listed in the IANA charset registry [7].
The charset registration procedure is described in RFC 2278 [9].
The default charset value is UTF-8 [10]. The MIBenum value for the UTF-8 charset is 106.
Language-Tag
The Language-Tag field is an ASCII string which contains a language tag, as defined in RFC 1766 [8].
Language tags are in principle case-insensitive; however, since the capitalization of a tag does not carry any meaning, implementations SHOULD send only lower-case Tag fields.
Thanks to Craig Fox (fox@cisco.com), James Carlson (carlson@ironbridgenetworks.com), Harald Alvestrand (Harald.Alvestrand@maxware.no), Kevin Smith (kevin@ascend.com), Karl Fox (karl@ascend.com), Thomas Narten (narten@raleigh.ibm.com) and Narendra Gidwani (nareng@microsoft.com) for helpful suggestions and feedback.
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
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