RE: New draft of What is encoding

Hi Najib,

Your comments caused me to add a substantial number of changes to the document, to make things clearer, and also to introduce more strongly the role of bytes in this.  See the updated wiki page.

Thanks,
RI

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

 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Najib Tounsi [mailto:ntounsi@emi.ac.ma] 
> Sent: 21 November 2007 22:36
> To: Richard Ishida
> Cc: public-i18n-core@w3.org
> Subject: 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 Monday, 26 November 2007 20:42:27 UTC