Re: format nego in HTML/10646?

Glenn Adams (glenn@stonehand.com)
Mon, 8 May 95 11:40:24 EDT

I think this discussion of whether and how to display characters
from 10646 outside of Latin 1 should be deferred or moved into a
private forum (perhaps we need a sublist for discussing the I18N
paper and issues -- I'm sure not everyone wishes to follow this thread).

What would be useful at this point is to specify in the current 2.0
RFC the requirements of a UA in rendering character data. I would
expect these requirements to read something like:

1. An HTML 2.0 UA must be capable of depicting all Latin 1 graphic
characters, that is, those characters in the range 0020 - 007E and
00A0 - 00FF, plus SPACE (0020).

2. An HTML 2.0 UA may optionally depict other graphic characters.

3. An HTML 2.0 UA which cannot depict a graphic character, e.g.,
a character reference whose replacement text has no representation
in the system character set, should depict such a character as either:

- an empty box (i.e., an unknown character glyph)
- a sequence of characters which represent the reference itself
rather than its replacement text, e.g., ￰

4. The same treatment (3) is to be given to SDATA entity references
which cannot be mapped to appropriate system character data.

Glenn