Re: First draft of section 3.1

Steve,

Excellent start! Thanks for kicking us off.

1) I like the breakdown and organization.

2) I am not clear on what we expect the reader to know. Perhaps we should have
a section at the top that says what we think the reader needs to know, and if
not where to get it? Maybe that will be more evident in the context of the
outline, but also, I am not expecting people will read this doc linearly.

3) Do we want to suggest utf-8, or instead Unicode with all its transforms, or
perhaps be specific about utf-8, utf-16?

4) user agents- I wonder how we are going to establish the details on the UA.
For example NS 4 has some support for Unicode, but doesn't work well with it
in forms. Should we say it can display it but not post it? I think even its
display is suspect. Doesnt support bidi I believe. For that matter, no UA
supports all of Unicode. What do we mean when we say a UA supports Unicode?

5) re Step1: Perhaps instead of choosing an encoding based on text languages,
we should break it into smaller steps.
a) identify the scripts used in your text.
b) identify the encodings supporting those scripts.

Similarly, implementation complexity is a mouthful:
c) identify the encodings that are supported by your publishing architecture
(web server, database, source control system)
d) identify the encodings supported by your authoring environment and tools 

e) I think I might lump considering the user agent requirements with these
considerations.

f) Identify the encodings supported by all these environments and tools and
supporting the languages in the text.

g) consider other factors such as performance and error-proneness of the
encodings (examples code-switching or double-byte), perhaps the need for
encoding conversions (difficulty, reliability of round-trip, etc.)

Not sure I like all this detail I am proposing however. I throw it out for
discussion.

6) multilingual is about languages and does not map onto encodings so well.
8859-1 is multilingual. Maybe we should use the term multiscript?
(I just made that up.)

7) Should this section consider the languages that might be input (into a
form)? In choosing an encoding, I should consider that my user might not have
the same language(s) as my pages.

hth
tex

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Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com
Xen Master                          http://www.i18nGuy.com
                         
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Received on Wednesday, 5 February 2003 01:52:20 UTC