Internationalization and Registration

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