Re: HTML-WG digest 107

David Baron (DAVIDB@accent.co.il)
Tue, 18 Jul 95 03:00:26 EDT

> Date: Tue, 18 Jul 95 02:17:50 EDT
> Reply-to: html-wg@oclc.org
> From: html-wg@oclc.org
> To: Multiple recipients of list <html-wg@oclc.org>
> Subject: HTML-WG digest 107

> Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 15:02:23 -0500
> From: "Amanda Walker" <amanda@intercon.com>
> To: DAVIDB@accent.co.il
> Cc: html-wg@oclc.org
> Subject: Re: HTML-WG digest 105: Unicode
> Message-ID: <9507171502.AA23330@eldamar.intercon.com>
>
> > We (Accent Software Internation) will be coming out with proposals for
> > an interim (Unicode UTF7 which is encoded in Latin-1 characters)
> > and additions to HTML-3 (also supportive to UTF-8 and maybe UCS-2
> > Unicode).
>
> What do you feel needs to be proposed? The current HTTP/HTML framework
> allows the use of UTF-7, UTF-8, and UCS-2 today. For HTTP, all you have to do
> is to provide the appropriate charset value in the Content-Type: line. How to
> do this is server-dependent, of course, and no currently available browsers
> support Unicode at all, to my knowledge, but I haven't run into anything that
> would prevent it.
>
>
> Amanda Walker
> InterCon Systems Corporation

We propose to do all within HTML. (The HTTP protocal does
allow 8-bit asciis, etc., but the in the SGML DTD
mandates latin-1 and the current HTML spec madates 7-bits.

UTF-7 is expressed in latin-1 characters. Other than
sequences so encoded, all latin-1 and named entities can
remain as is. An escape sequence such as &+ begins an
encoded sequence and - or end of line ends it. (UTF7 uses a
sole + as its escape but this would interfere with older
pages.) The encoded HTML would import, be editable and
exported from an authoring edition of the Accent
(multilingual) WP (until a browzer is implemented).

We will propose additons to HTML3 for specifiying other
encodings, paragraph reading-order for bidi, etc.