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

Hi Tex,

On Dec 3, 2007 12:48 PM, Tex Texin <tex@yahoo-inc.com> wrote:
> Marcos,
>
> I don't see a conflict with my proposal. The benefit is it eliminates perpetuating the encoding ambiguity and interoperability problems that plague many of our specs and apps.
>
> Restricting filenames to utf-8 would mean if you don't have the latest zipping tools, you need to stick with ascii names, which is not such a big burden (and kinder than adding in cp437 support!).

I agree in principle and I think it might be worth while to include a
solution to the problem as a short note. However, specifying the use
UTF-8 would contradict the Zip specification which says cp437 unless
GPB11 is set. Zip provides an appropriate solution, it's just a matter
of implementers following the Zip spec.

> Regarding the design principle, it seems to give too much weight to operating system vendors and therefore somewhat inappropriate for the W3C. Search for downloadable freeware compression utilities, and there are many that support zip format.
> Perhaps the principle should reflect more what is commonly available for no cost, rather than begin tied to OS support.

Our design goal does not preclude people using open source or
commercial zipping tools. It simply says that, "a conforming
specification should specify solutions that are easy to use and avoid
unnecessary complexity, meaning that a widget resource should be easy
for authors to create without requiring special software, and easy for
end-users to acquire and install/run." By no means did I mean to imply
that I was giving more weight to OS vendors. I support any solution
that simply allows me to right click on a folder to create an
interoperable zip archive (be it with 7Zip, WinZip, or Windows
Compressed Folders, etc).

> I searched for "zip files download unicode filenames" and see many that support unicode filenames.
> (I didn't check to see how many were free or how broad the OS coverage was.)

>From my own searches, the coverage does not seem all that good. Many
of the zipping tools that support unicode that I have found are
actually programming libraries.
Kind regards,
Marcos
-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Tuesday, 4 December 2007 01:27:07 UTC