Response to WebCGM 2.1 Last Call comment:i18n comment 5: ISOLatin1

Dear Richard,

The WebCGM Working Group has reviewed the comment you sent [1] about the 
WebCGM 2.1 Last Call Working Draft [2] published on 02 October 2008. 
Thank you for having taken the time to review the document and send us 
comments.

The Working Group's response resolution to your comment is included below.

Please review it carefully and acknowledge this WebCGM WG response by 
replying to this mail and copying the WebCGM public mailing list 
<public-webcgm@w3.org>. Let us know if you agree with it or not before 
11 Jan 2009.  If we receive no reply from you by January 11, then we 
will default your reply to "WebCGM WG response accepted."

In case of disagreement, you are requested to provide a specific 
solution for or a path to a consensus with the Working Group.

If such a consensus cannot be achieved, you will be given the 
opportunity to raise a formal objection which will then be reviewed by 
the Director during the transition of this document to the next stage in 
the W3C Recommendation Track.

Best regards,

On behalf of the WebCGM Working Group,
Thierry Michel, WebCGM WG Team Contact.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webcgm-wg/2008Oct/0000.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-webcgm21-20080917/
_____________________________________________________________
* Comment Sent: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:28:54 +0000
* Archived:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webcgm/2008Nov/0004.html

The WebCGM WG has the following responses to your comment:
----------------------------------------------------------

SUMMARY of your comment:
Comment from the i18n review of:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-webcgm21-20080917/WebCGM21-Config.html#ACI-fontmap

Comment 5
At http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/0811-webcgm/
Editorial/substantive: E/S
Tracked by: RI

Location in reviewed document:
9.3.2.2 
[http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-webcgm21-20080917/WebCGM21-Config.html#ACI-maplist]

Comment:

"These normalization rules are applicable for font names specified using 
the characters of ISOLatin1. They will likely be inapplicable for font 
names specified using other non-Latin characters."

What happens in the case of Latin-2 (Eastern Europe), which is similar 
to Latin1 but contains a few additional characters. Does a single 
non-Latin1 character cause normalization to be abandoned for the whole 
string?

It seems like the only thing that wouldn't apply to all non-Latin1 font 
names is converting to lower-case, though that is still a relevant 
consideration for many other Latin characters outside Latin1, and for 
Armenian, Greek and Cyrillic. Why restrict to Latin1?


RESPONSE to your comment:


The apparent restriction to Latin 1 was unintended. As you point out, 
the normalization would work the same if the same names were expressed 
in Latin 2. Latin 1 got the special mention because: 1.) the default 
character encoding of WebCGM is ISO 8859-1; and, 2.) the vast majority 
of current and legacy WebCGM instances use this character encoding and a 
restricted core set of thirteen specific font names. As pointed out in 
WebCGM's reply to I18N's issue #3, these WebCGM-specific normalization 
rules were targeted at the substantial volume of legacy and current 
metafiles that intend to invoke this restricted core set of fonts, but 
that contain well-known, trivial deviations in the construction of the 
names. In other words, the real target is trivially deviant usage of the 
13 specific core-font names, regardless of the character encoding. (More 
background: the valid character encoding for any particular WebCGM 
instance is one of the three ISO 8859-1, unicode UTF-8, or unicode UTF-16.)

WebCGM will reword to clarify the useful scope of these normalization 
rules, to remove the implication of a normative restriction of 
applicability, and instead to be advisory about the usefulness of that 
normalization outside of its primary intended scope. Replace the two 
quoted sentences in question (in the 9.3.2.2 description of 'cgmFont') with:

"Note: These normalization rules are derived from and intended for the 
substantial volume of existing metafiles that aim to invoke fonts from 
WebCGM's restricted core set of thirteen specific fonts (see T.16.13 of 
@@section 6.5@@) and that contain well-known and trivial deviations in 
the construction of those font names. The rules may be less useful 
outside of that intended scope. The target metafiles of these 
normalizations are most often, but not always, encoded in WebCGM's 
default character encoding of ISO 8859-1."

[Ed-note: @@section 6.5@@ denotes text "section 6.5" that links to 
"WebCGM21-Profile.html#webcgm_4_5", which in the LCWD version is:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-webcgm21-20080917/WebCGM21-Profile.html#webcgm_4_5 
]


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Received on Friday, 19 December 2008 16:03:24 UTC