Re: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set

Dan Connolly (connolly@w3.org)
Fri, 5 May 95 15:45:40 EDT

Glenn Adams writes:
>
> Date: Fri, 5 May 95 09:47:31 EDT
> From: Terry Allen <terry@ora.com>
>
> I'd be happy to make the change to 10646 in the very next revision; I
> just want to keep our rationale for 2.0 straight.
>
> If 2.1 comes along quickly then I have no objection to leaving the 10646
> decision for that version (provided we put a note in the current 2.0 text
> to let folks know our intentions to make this change).
>
> My only concern is a practical one relating to how soon 2.1 will arrive.

My bet is that THERE WILL BE NO 2.1 document. There will simply
be an internationalization document. And a tables document. And
a link relationships document... Perhaps one of these documents
will define HTML version 2.1 by referencing the 2.0 document and
specifying the changes. Perhaps the whole new DTD will go out as
another RFC.

But the entire content of the HTML 2.0 document will not be brought up
for review again, if I can help it.

> Even though most people have essentially agreed on using 10646 as the doc
> charset, many still disagree on the timing. My question to you (Terry,
> Eric, Dan) is whether the change I'm suggesting will break anything if it
> goes in now?

Yes, it will: If I put &#2789 (or whatever) all over my documents, and
the HTML 2.0 spec specifies that this document is legal, and yet it
doesn't work on 95% of the browsers in existence, then we
lose. Granted, there are corner cases of documents where this is the
case currently, but not on anything as substantive as this.

Making ISO10646 the document character set is NOT just an editorial
change. It is substantive. And while I agree that the impact on
existing practice is minimal, it is NOT zero.

I'm willing to put whatever editorial material in there that warns
folks about ISO10646 in the future, but I'm still not convinced that
now is the time to change the HTML 2.0 language itself.

In fact, I'm hereby soliciting exact wording changes to the document.
Well... I'm currently focusing on the first three sections of the
document, and I'll expect more changes when we get to the next few
sections.

We're not really done until the words in the document are such that we
all agree on them. A bunch of messages saying "I agree" might look
like agreement, but when you actually see the resulting document, what
that person was agreeing to and what the author of the document thought
s/he was agreeing to might be slightly (or not so slightly) different.

Dan