RE: AGENDA: I18N GEO TF telcon, 2004-11-03 at 18:00 UTC/GMT, 10am Seattle, 2pm Boston, 18:00 London, 19:00 Paris, 5am Melbourne

Well, I was planning to discuss that during the meeting, but here's a heads
up since you won't be there.

There have been a number of questions on the Web Standards Group mailing
list relating to encoding and use of escapes. For example, I've come across
a couple of people recently who thought the HTML validator was problematic
because it complained when they switched their file to utf-8.  Of course,
all they actually did was change the charset declaration - they didn't
realise that that was insufficient to convert the bytes in the page.

So we're talking about a fairly low level of understanding here.

On the list the term 'special characters' seems to be used to refer to
non-ASCII characters. Since it's a term they seem to use, it might be worth
using in the question to grab their attention.  Of course, we'll need to
define our usage immediately in the text.

So I'm thinking we want something that 
a. introduces the idea of what encoding is about, and why you need to pay
attention to it
b. recommends the use of proper encodings, rather than escapes
c. tells people how to apply an encoding, and points people to the faq about
how to save your file in utf-8 by phil

All this in REALLY easy to understand terms.  (We should probably indicate
in the introduction that this is for beginners, so as not to alienate
slightly more technical people who come across this before seeing other
stuff on the site.)

Some of this seems to be along the lines of what Deborah wanted to write
about a while back.

Let's discuss more during the meeting.

RI


============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info:
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 

W3C Internationalization:
http://www.w3.org/International/ 

Publication blog:
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Duerst [mailto:duerst@w3.org] 
> Sent: 24 November 2004 03:25
> To: Richard Ishida; GEO
> Subject: Re: AGENDA: I18N GEO TF telcon, 2004-11-03 at 18:00 
> UTC/GMT, 10am Seattle, 2pm Boston, 18:00 London, 19:00 Paris, 
> 5am Melbourne
> 
> At 02:53 04/11/24, Richard Ishida wrote:
> 
> 
>  >Discussion
>  >
>  >-	Proposal for new FAQ: How do I deal with 'special characters'?
> 
> There are all kinds of 'special characters'. What kinds are 
> you trying to cover in this FAQ? [I think anything is fine as 
> long as it's clear what it is about.]
> 
> Regards,   Martin. 
>

Received on Wednesday, 24 November 2004 12:54:01 UTC