RE: Link-6: Addressing at the sub-element level

At 12:17 20/05/97 -0400, Steven J. DeRose wrote:

>If the user interaction model is
>that people create links by staring at formatted output and counting glyphs,
>of course there's a problem -- but that seems absurd.

I agree this is absurd.  But the conclusion seems to me to be that either

- we don't do character counting, or

- we accept that people are going to need tools to be able to create
documents that use XML link (or at least this aspect of it): they are not
going to be able just to use vi/notepad.

>If you count characters of the source content, why won't everyone count them
>the same way? The only problem I see would be with a system that silently
>"normalized" data somehow, and lost track of what the original data was.

I think a system might quite reasonably choose normalize precomposed
characters into composite characters or vice-versa, since there's no real
difference in the semantics. If I've got a base character followed by a
non-spacing character, and the combination of the two is available in
Unicode as a precomposed character, and I've got a system that doesn't have
the machinery to render non-spacing characters, then it might well be
desirable for it to do the precomposition.

James

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 1997 23:53:00 UTC