Your comments on Character Model Fundamentals [LC009]

Dear Frank,

Many thanks for your comments on the 3rd Last Call version of the Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals [1].  We appreciate the interest you have taken in this specification.

You can see the comments you submitted, grouped together, at http://www.w3.org/International/Group/2004/charmod1-lc/SortByOriginator.html#LC009
(You can jump to a specific comment in the table by adding its ID to the end of the URI.)

PLEASE REVIEW the decisions for the following comment and reply to us within the next 7 days at mailto:www-i18n-comments@w3.org (copying w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org) to say whether you are satisfied with the decision taken. 
        LC009

Information relating to these comments is included below.

These comments relate to the editor's version at http://www.w3.org/International/Group/charmod-edit/charmod1.html

Best regards,
Richard Ishida, for the I18N WG




DECISIONS REQUIRING A RESPONSE
==============================

LC009
http://www.w3.org/International/Group/2004/charmod1-lc/SortByOriginator.html#LC009
Decision: Rejected We have decided to reject your comment, but would like to thank you for making it, because it has helped us getting more clarity on what exactly we should say.

We agree that C069, as it was written, at least in some interpretations, would have prohibited ASCII art and ASCII smilies, and potentially even Unicode smilies and so on. While we do not think that ASCII art and ASCII smilies are necessarily a good idea, and in particular there are accessibility issues, we note that there is quite a widespread practice, and that with respect to accessibility, it is the expertise of a separate group, and a separate spec, that is most qualified to decide this (WCAG 1.0 has some techniques that mention ASCII art, but doesn't prohibit it outrightly). So we decided to defer the question of what to say about ASCII art and so on, and decided to remove C069, and insert a much more specific conformance requirement into the spec, placed somewhat earlier after the Note after C073:

>>>>>>>> 
C076 [C] Content MUST NOT use a code point for any purpose other than that defined by its character encoding.

This prohibits the construction of fonts that misuse e.g. iso-8859-1 to represent different scripts, characters, or symbols than what is actually encoded in iso-8859-1. 
>>>>>>>>

This is the major misuse that we tried to address with C069, in a somewhat too general a fashion. In an ASCII smiley, a ')' is still a ')' as defined in ASCII, it's just used in a different way than usually, but neither the character model nor Unicode say how characters can be used and how not.




USEFUL LINKS
==============
[1] The version of CharMod you commented on: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-charmod-20040225/
[2] Latest editor's version (still being edited): 
http://www.w3.org/International/Group/charmod-edit/charmod1.html
[3] Last Call comments table, sorted by ID: 
http://www.w3.org/International/Group/2004/charmod1-lc/

Received on Friday, 8 October 2004 13:41:01 UTC