Re: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set

lilley (lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk)
Fri, 5 May 95 07:10:51 EDT

Eric said:

> I just don't think 10646 as a doc charset
> has anything to do with current practice.

Well, current practice is a bunch of software and documents. The concept of
a document character set as opposed to a character encoding scheme is a
formalism used to _describe_ current practice.

In another posting I have suggested that the document character set for
2.0 be 10646 with the restriction that only the first 256 character positions
are allowed for compatibility with historical implementations.

This documents current practice, it just uses slightly different (but
entirely compatible) concepts to do so.

> Right now, the HTML 2.0 document is one of SEVERAL documents
> we're working on. It is basically done. These last qualms about making sure
> that the wording of the spec doesn't limit our progress in future directions
> for i18n are fine and part of due diligence, but let us not get distracted
> from getting this document totally finished. We need to be able to focus
> our attention on the tables document, the i18n document, and so on.

I agree completely about the need to get this out the door and the other
documents too, as my previous posts to this group testify. At the same time
I do not want a spec going out that lets people use any arbitrary character
set as the document character set.

Its not as if any incompatibilities are being proposed here, just a slightly
different formal description of current practice.

--
Chris Lilley, Technical Author
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