WG response to i18n-ISSUE-411: Definition of whitespace should come from Unicode

Hi Steven, I believe we have closure on 409 and 410, but we haven't
heard back on 411.


* Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org> [2015-03-27 11:57-0400]
> This thread went on to discuss the usage of the various whitespace
> characters but I believe there was consensus that programming/data
> languages should use U+0009, U+000A, U+000D, U+0020 as whitespace.
> The LDP WG believes this resolves this comment with no edits required.
> Steven Atkin, as the originator of this comment, can you confirm?
> 
> 
> On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 6:05 AM, Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Mar 7, 2015 9:04 AM, "Asmus Freytag (t)" <asmus-inc@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 3/6/2015 11:26 PM, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Mar 7, 2015 2:04 AM, "Andrew Sullivan" <ajs@anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:
> >>> >
> >>> > On Thu, Mar 05, 2015 at 10:38:01PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> >>> > > No, since you ask.  We use Unicode, but we don't require that every
> >>> > > non-printing character be recognized as a delimiter.
> >>> >
> >>> > What I worry about is inconsistent handling of whitespace across
> >>> > implementations.  But anyway, I guess this isn't really the place to
> >>> > fix that up, since it'd be all over XML anyway, right?  (I guess I'm
> >>> > just sensitive to this right now because the IETF tried to do clever
> >>> > things with paring down Unicode to things we wanted, and it isn't
> >>> > working quite as we'd hoped.)
> >>>
> >>> I suspect that whitespace is pretty consistently treated as the four
> >>> control codes this point. In 2006 I tried a more inclusive definition of
> >>> whitespace in SPARQL but folks said "what the hell is this? Everybody knows
> >>> that whitespace is four characters." Had things like non-breaking,
> >>> zero-width, all-singing space stayed in SPARQL, parsers would have required
> >>> multi-byte lexers and the interoperability of incomplete implementations
> >>> would have suffered.
> >>>
> >>> The downside is that someone typing in some script with its own
> >>> whitespace (does that exist?) must use ASCII space, but they have to anyways
> >>> because all of the language keywords are in ASCII.
> >>
> >>
> >> For programming languages, sticking to the basic set for syntax purposes
> >> makes a certain amount of sense.
> >>
> >> When you are dealing with text data, or free-form input, this approach can
> >> be unnecessarily limiting.
> >>
> >> All the markup languages have the issue that both language syntax and text
> >> content reside in the same "plain-text" file, leading to complicated rules
> >> about which whitespace characters are part of the text content and which are
> >> to be ignored for text purpose for being syntax characters.
> >
> > I completely agree with your analysis.
> >
> >> However, Andrew's point is well taken - it's important to not let the
> >> programmer's attitude infect those parts of whatever protocol is being
> >> designed that are concerned with representing full-text data. It better be
> >> possible to not only represent all space characters (and zero width
> >> characters), but to have them act on the text in the way they are defined in
> >> Unicode when segmenting text for whatever purpose.
> >
> > That makes sense to me. I think that both XML and RDF are languages upon
> > which such applications would be built. In a sense, the only way they can
> > screw up would be to not permit non-ASCII whitespace characters. Do you
> > agree?
> >
> >> A./
> >>
> >>> > A
> >>> >
> >>> > --
> >>> > Andrew Sullivan
> >>> > ajs@anvilwalrusden.com
> >>> >
> >>
> >>
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> -ericP
> office: +1.617.258.5741
> mobile: +1.617.599.3509
> 

-- 
-ericP

office: +1.617.599.3509
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Received on Monday, 27 April 2015 13:11:07 UTC