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Re: UTF-8+names

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: UTF-8+names
• From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 09:10:30 -0700 (PDT)
• In-reply-to: <r02000200-1028-1CD20FB2024311D8B3120003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>

--- "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...> wrote:
> mc@x... (Mike Champion) writes:

> >No more than any other non-trivial encoding, which
> gets in to deep
> >philosophical territory about whether "Ë?" is the
> same as "oe"

:-)  Well, there's the problem in a hard little
nutshell -- the assumption of 127-bit "characters" is
still extremely deeply rooted in a LOT of the software
that we (at least in North America) have to deal with
every day, like it or not.  

>
> This makes me laugh hysterically, as the original
> notion of Unicode was
> to develop a big enough space that all the
> characters could live in
> happy co-existence without need for layering in the
> character space.

Sure! The question is how to do something to make our
lives less unpleasant while The System plots forward. 
Be patient, vote with our feet against crappy software
that can't handle Unicode decently, or try to hack up
something in the interim?  The whole point of Unicode
encodings is to map conveniently enterable text onto
codepoints, and whatever the technical virtues or
flaws of Tim's strawman proposal, this seems like the
right layer to address it.

> The wart has remained in XML because the W3C hasn't
> dared address
> entities directly, 

The "W3C" (which after all is a few thousand different
people with very different ideas) has been wrestling
with this for years, the trouble is that no very great
ideas have come up AFAIK.  What's you're Wart-Off
suggestion?  

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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