Re: controls for GEO discusssion

Hello Tex,

Some more comments on your Q&A.

Overall, I think that the answer is much too long. It not only
answers 'How do ... support control codes', but also 'what are
control codes', and so on. But the question assumes a basic
knowledge of control codes. Peolpe who don't know these
are not even interested in reading the answer.

Also, I guess the real question is not how HTML and XML
support control codes, but "How can I represent control
codes in HTML or XML".

The basic message also should be improved. (X)HTML is a
textual format used to represent text. There is absolutely
no need to use control codes in (X)HTML. If anybody thinks
otherwise, they didn't understand (X)HTML. I don't remember
having been asked about control codes in (X)HTML at all.
This should be clearly reflected in the answer.

XML in general is used both for text and for data. So
there may be some interesting use cases for control
codes in XML. The typical example would be an XML
format for control code sequences for terminals
(i.e. an XML version of a unix termcap file).

Apart from such rather exotic examples, the main reason
that there are control codes in data usually is one of
the following (most probably in the following order):

- Pure garbage. The right thing is to clean up your data.

- Old ways of representing data (starting with using Backspace
   to get accented versions of characters). The right thing
   is to convert your data, i.e. by doing the correct transcoding
   or by adding markup.

In the table, I suggest to have separate rows for
CR/LF/TAB and for NEL (which is special in XML 1.1).


The page says: "An alternative is to encode the data. For example,
encode the data as base64 or as hexadecimal values, to ensure only
supported characters are used in the markup language text."

I'm very surprised to see this on an i18n-related page.
What this will do is that it will throw out of the window
any and all i18n features that XML has. So from an i18n
viewpoint, we should not recommend it, we should indeed
clearly recommend against it.

Hope this helps.

Regards,    Martin.




At 12:49 03/05/28 -0400, Tex Texin wrote:
>I am not sure why, but the geo list isn't distributing (my?) mail since lst
>night.
>
>Here is the controls page for q&a today.
>I may be a little late to the meeting.
>
>http://www.i18nguy.com/test/controls.htm
>
>sorry, I don't have everyone's email. (maybe that's a good thing. ;-) )
>
>tex
>
>--
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com
>Xen Master                          http://www.i18nGuy.com
>
>XenCraft                            http://www.XenCraft.com
>Making e-Business Work Around the World
>-------------------------------------------------------------

Received on Friday, 30 May 2003 14:44:16 UTC