- From: McDonald, Ira <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>
- Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:37:37 -0800
- To: "'Erik Wilde'" <net.dret@dret.net>, uri@w3.org
- Cc: Tim Kindberg <timothy@hpl.hp.com>, uri-review@ietf.org, uri@w3.org, Bennett.Marks@nokia.com, Ted Hardie <hardie@qualcomm.com>, Antti Vähä-Sipilä <antti.vaha-sipila@nokia.com>, Basavaraj.Patil@nokia.com, Markus.Isomaki@nokia.com, alastair_angwin@UK.IBM.COM, Ileana.Leuca@cingular.com, martti.ala-rantala@nokia.com
Erik Wilde wrote on Monday 20 March 2006:
>
>
> > http://dret.net/netdret/docs/draft-wilde-sms-uri-12.txt says:
> >> Implementations MAY choose to silently discard (or
> convert) characters in >the sms-body that are not supported
> by the SMS character set they are using
> >> to send the SMS message.
> > Depending on language this can be a very bad thing, as
> removing a diacritical here or even dropping a letter there
> can change the meaning of a message. The user would not want
> this done silently, so the implementations SHOULD if possible
> ask for confirmation.
>
> you are right that silently discarding or converting
> characters is not a
> good idea. i have changed the sentence to:
>
> "Implementations MAY choose to discard (or convert) characters in the
> sms-body that are not supported by the SMS character set they
> are using
> to send the SMS message. If they do discard or convert
> characters, they
> MUST notify te user."
>
>
The above still needs a little more improvement, I think.
There are three possible things to do with an unsupported character:
(1) Discard - warning notice SHOULD be added to the message body;
(2) Convert - replace with some (near) match supported character;
(3) Substitute - replace with a fixed 'substitution character'
such as '?' or the Unicode REPLACEMENT CHARACTER '0xFFFE'.
Also (for multibyte charsets), normalization of the character
stream is needed to detect and process 'whole' characters (e.g.,
a decomposed base character plus its diacritical marks) that may
be represented by more than one octet in the stream.
Cheers,
- Ira
Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221 Grand Marais, MI 49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: imcdonald@sharplabs.com
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Received on Monday, 20 March 2006 17:46:11 UTC