Re: Enhancements for HTML 2.1

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Sun, 19 Mar 1995 11:58:05 -0500

I took a look at the ERCS (Extended Reference Concrete Syntax) page
>he posted, and it looks promising as a way to write SGML declarations
>for larger character sets. On the other hand it looks like
>ERCS is itself in draft status.

ERCS is gaining support rapidly (or at least, it appears so).

>It might make sense, if the working group agrees with the concept of
>using ERCS to support HTML over Unicode (and other character sets
>sufficently unlike Latin-1 that are subsets of Unicode), to try and
>put hooks for it in the main standard but write it up as another
>internet-draft/RFC.

We could even go as far as to promote the canonical ERCS declaration
as the "ideal", and then explain how current browsers fit in. I like
the RFC idea. Perhaps Rick and I should put one together?

>Has anyone actually looked at what Netscape is doing with character
>set support in their new version (I'm not in a position to judge the
>results.)

>From what I've seen of the (patched) browsers here in Japan, they are
mostly following the Mosaic-L10N model.

>I'd suggest that a good critera for trying to put something
>in 2.1 is that it be modular and not drag in lots of side
>issues.

Agreed. I think we can get away with using ERCS, provided we can
show how current usage maps into it (as a subset).