- From: Dennis E. Hamilton <infonuovo@email.com>
- Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 14:07:48 -0800
- To: "Greg Stein" <gstein@lyra.org>, "Jim Whitehead" <ejw@cse.ucsc.edu>
- Cc: "Adam Klatzkin" <Adam.Klatzkin@bentley.com>, <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
I want to respond on two topics -- the problems being encountered around internationalization and the question I swear I saw here about registering properties for DAV applications (but I can't find in my WebDAV/DASL folder). The internationalization and character set problem is one of those great demonstrators of system incoherence that leaves users helpless (the greatest one from the recent and present past being end-to-end delivery of e-mail with intelligible attachments). It shows up in all efforts at document-management interoperability. (The ODMA middleware fails to implement the ODMA specification concerning character set encodings, and the specification fails to provide interoperability across code-page regimes. I am not picking on ODMA, it is simply one I have been struggling with most recently. It demonstrates how intuitively-convenient approaches can fail to achieve the goals that are claimed for them.) The AIIM DMware site, still under development, is intended to provide a forum and resources for (1) exposing these difficulties; (2) identifying experiences, practices, and tools that overcome them; and (3) providing a place where people can perform open registration of metadata definitions and tag sets as a way of fostering reuse and development of commonly-reusable definitions. This can include character sets, encodings, and also collation rules specific to different language groups and applications. Interoperability and interchange of metadata identifications between different systems (e.g., the DAV and XML name-space scheme, the DMA and other GUID-based schemes, the ODMA tag scheme, the property set scheme shared throughout Microsoft products, and so on) is also to be supported. This is not meant to be a grandiose all-embracing database. The idea is to provide a place where people can voluntarily contribute to the accumulation of information and experience and it can be grown and extended as its utility is established. I don't have a particular model other than it should be easy to use, raise the level of awareness of what there is to pay attention to, and be conformable to more-ambitious models for metadata-description interchange. I am not sure where there is a good forum for continuing discussions on this topic -- it is tangential to WebDAV, DASL, and DeltaV, although it crosses many interests. Because these topics have shown up here, I wanted to invite suggestions from participants here on how we might find a mutual interest and take advantage of AIIM DMware support in this area. I invite further discussion and suggestions on this topic. Please respond here or directly to me. Thanks, -- Dennis AIIM DMware Technical Coordinator AIIM DMware http://www.infonuovo.com/dmware ODMA Support http://www.infonuovo.com/odma ------------------ Dennis E. Hamilton tel. +1-425-793-0283 mailto:orcmid@email.com fax. +1-425-430-8189 -----Original Message----- From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Greg Stein Sent: Friday, December 08, 2000 04:40 To: Jim Whitehead Cc: Adam Klatzkin; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org Subject: Re: internationalization http://test.webdav.org/dav/ is always available to anybody wishing to do DAV testing (against mod_dav). Cheers, -g On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 03:54:09PM -0800, Jim Whitehead wrote: > Hmm, this is worse than I had feared. Based on your experience, it seems > the best near-term approach is to stick with single-byte latin characters. > > Looking to the future, however, one of the ways you could help the community > is by hosting (or allowing me to host) a publically available DAV server > that has a directory containing multiple character sets. Ideally, you would > have a Web site with a picture of what it is supposed to look like, and then > the area where DAV clients could be directed for testing. One of the > reasons why the current i18n support is so bad is due to the lack of a > publically available server that is responding with multi-byte characters. > > Alternately, perhaps this is something that mod_dav can do, and perhaps Greg > Stein could provide a multi-byte character testing directory on webdav.org. > Greg? > > - Jim > > Adam Klatzkin writes: > > Can anybody offer any advice on implementing an internationalized webDAV > > server that will work with existing webDAV clients. > > The server I am developing encodes all data in utf-8. Whenever I return > > this multistatus response to Microsoft web folders (under Win2K) if the > > utf-8 stream contains all latin (single-byte) characters it works > > fine. If > > there are characters in the stream that are multi-byte, web > > folders crashes. > > e.g. > > <D:displayname>My Folder</D:displayname> > > ^--- works fine > > <D:displayName>["My Folder" in the Arabic unicode > > subrange]</D:displayName> > > ^--- web folders crashes and explorer goes down with it. > > > > Under WinNT webfolders does not crash, but I get the following error > > "The current operation cannot be completed because an unexpected error has > > occurred" > > > > Using Riverfront WebDrive I do not receive any errors but the > > UTF-8 data is > > displayed as ASCII. -- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
Received on Wednesday, 20 December 2000 17:07:34 UTC