Re: [DR 609] I18N experts' view

Hello Hugo,

Many thanks for the summary. Just one comment:

At 00/12/01 17:28 -0500, Hugo Haas wrote:
> From the 2nd draft requirements document[1]:
>
>    DR609
>           The XP specification should mandate the use of UTF-8 as its
>           character set of choice.
>
>           Discussion: There is a very good discussion currently on the WG
>           private mailing list about this topic, when this discussion
>           recedes we can formulate the requirement from the consensus.
>
>I talked to Martin D$B|r(Bst and Misha Wolf about this again. First, this DR
>should talk about character encoding, not characted set.
>
>Second, the answer to the question "can you encode any character you
>want with UTF-8" is "almost". Misha mentionned some Egyptian hieroglyphs
>not expressable in UTF-8.

This applies not only to UTF-8, but also to any other encoding of Unicode/
ISO 10646. It therefore also applies to XML itself, and therefore to XP.
There is therefore no interaction between the fact that Unicode encodes
'almost' all characters and DR609.

There is absolutely nothing XP can and should do about Unicode encoding
'almost' all characters. XP users who want to use e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphs
in XP or otherwise in XML will just have to wait for them to be encoded
(this is underway, but will take some more time), or they may use the
private use area (which of course removes worldwide interoperability).

Regards,   Martin.


>Finally, they reiterated the comments made by Martin by email[2]. His
>conclusion was:
>
>On Wed, Nov 8, 2000, Martin J. Duerst wrote:
>[..]
> > So overall I suggest:
> >
> > - Don't fix on 'UTF-8 only' or 'more than UTF-8' now.
> > - Make clear in the Req doc that that's something that will
> >    have to be decided.
> > - Get feedback and evaluate tradeoffs.
>
>Basically, there a lot of reasons why we would want to restrict XP to
>UTF-8, and a lot of other reasons why considering a larger set of
>character encodings would be a good idea. However, they think that it is
>premature to want to resolve this problem now. They suggested that we
>get back to the I18N WG when we have more input.
>
>I suggest that in order to ask for feedback we keep DR609 as a DR and
>rephrase it as:
>
>   The XP specification may or may not mandate the use of UTF-8 as its
>   character encoding of choice.
>
>   Discussion: The Working Group is aware of the complexity resulting in
>   the use of a large set of character encodings but is unable at this
>   point in time to make a decision on such a restriction.
>
>That way, we are postponing the issue and inviting comments both from
>the I18N WG and other people.
>
>   1. http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/xp-reqs-02
>   2. 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-xml-protocol-wg/2000Nov/0226.html
>
>--
>Hugo Haas - W3C/MIT
>mailto:hugo@w3.org - http://www.w3.org/People/Hugo/ - tel:+1-617-452-2092

Received on Sunday, 3 December 2000 21:09:25 UTC