Re: New draft of What is encoding

Hi Richard, all,

Richard Ishida wrote:
> http://www.w3.org/International/wiki/What_is_encoding
>
> Please take a look and comment by/on Tuesday.
>   

Here are some comments:

Section "What's a character encoding? "

The section is more 'why' encoding than 'What is' encoding.

2nd §
"Basically, all characters are stored in computers using a numeric code."
One might understand that this code is in fact the encoding. Please 
insist on distinction between the two.
e.g some thing like
s/are stored in computers using a numeric code./are assigned a number 
(numeric code) and stored in computers/

3rd §, 2nd sentence
"It is a set of mappings between numbers (ie. bytes) and characters."
numbers doesn't have the same meaning here. The bytes represent a given 
number (numeric code).

4th §
"... ie. many different ways of mapping between the same numbers and 
different characters."
True. But, as you are talking about multiple encodings of characters, 
you should also say that there are many ways to encode the same 
character: for 'é' we have 223 in ISO 8859-1, two bytes in UTF-8, 16bits 
in UTF-16 with another value etc...


Section "What about fonts?"

Add a sentence (after the second §) to insist that the font come AFTER 
encoding, i.e seeing a bad glyph (for absence of font)   is not the same 
as seeing a badly decoded character.

Section  "How does this affect me?"

2nd §, 2nd sentence "(Note: Just declaring the encoding won't change the 
bytes, you need to save the text in that encoding too.)"
Too important to be put between parenthesis.

I think talking about HTTP, is not really necessary, since the reader 
has already something to mash/eat with "What is character encoding, and 
why she/he should care?".
On the other hand, you might say it between parenthesis.
Or show clearly (i.e two things) that the reader should care about encoding:
1- When authoring a document
2- When the document is served.

Regards, Najib

> Thanks,
> RI
>
> ============
> Richard Ishida
> Internationalization Lead
> W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
>  
> http://www.w3.org/International/
> http://rishida.net/blog/
> http://rishida.net/
>
>  
>
>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2007 22:35:55 UTC