The character set issues we discussed at the San Jose meeting resulted in a
decision which looked like relatively minor edits to the document, or so I
thought. Larry's changes came out a lot longer than I thought they would,
but perhaps I misunderstood something.
>I hear a lot of concern about character sets and internationization.
>Folks have alleged that "current practice" is more than just ASCII
>and Latin1.
I hear that too, but the document has to get out.
>On the other hand, for the 2.0 document, I'm inclined to "shoot the
>engineers and ship it." The 2.0 document is intended to capture
>the "current practice" as of about June 1994.
That has been my perspective as well.
>I'd like to see the 2.0 document go out essentially as-is. It's something
>to look back on, to see what practices we like and don't like, and
>what ways of describing/specifying those practices we like and don't like.
Personally, I really really really want this document to be submitted
almost exactly as is. There will ALWAYS be people who think that just one
more issue "absolutely must be addressed or the document will be useless."
>Eventually, we want the HTML spec documents to reflect the state of
>the art, no?
Yes, I think we do.
--The spirit of the decisions made in San Jose was that we could not leave the character set issues totally unmentioned in the document, but that we should put in the least amount of material possible, in such a fashion that we can address the issue further in future revs of the spec. I think we should stick with that philosophy, and get the document submitted asap.
-- Eric W. Sink, Senior Software Engineer -- eric@spyglass.com