Re: I18N issues for Widgets Spec [Was: Re: [Widgets] ASCII File names - request for comments]

On Dec 1, 2007 1:52 AM, Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com> wrote:
> On Nov 30, 2007, at 13:29, Marcos Caceres wrote:
> > On Nov 30, 2007 10:14 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:
> >> This is really an issue with the "ZIP" specification and deployed
> >> soft-
> >> ware, not with the "Widgets" specification. It does not seem
> >> useful to
> >> say anything about this in the Widgets specification beyond saying
> >> the
> >> archive should be created in accordance with the ZIP specification
> >> and
> >> that there may be interoperability issues with using non-ASCII names,
> >> so those should be avoided, which should be quite normal for authors.
> >
> > I'm totally ok with doing that... I guess as long as it won't raise
> > any issues later because we didn't really provide a solution to the
> > problem. Would this be ok with the i18n community? (ie. make it
> > Zip/implementer's problem) .
>
> The I18N community is, by definition, pretty much all of us ;-) More
> seriously, in general and as a rule of thumb it's a bad idea for one
> specification to try an address issues present in another. It's an
> almost sure-fire way of creating incompatibilities and animosity down
> the line.

Agreed. The issues are not so much in the Zip spec, more in that some
vendors took a bit of liberty with their Zip implementations (eg.
MacOs encoding names in UTF-8, and Java encoding with Modified UTF-8,
etc).

> The only exception to this rule is of course if you're for instance
> the CDF WG or the TAG, in which case you should regularly threaten to
> solve other people's issues so that, in awed fear that you might
> actually do it, they get to work.

:)

-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Monday, 3 December 2007 01:35:25 UTC