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RE: UTF-8+names

• To: "'David Carlisle'" <davidc@n...>
• Subject: RE: UTF-8+names
• From: "Alessandro Triglia" <sandro@m...>
• Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 15:07:50 -0400
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <200310201743.SAA21440@e3000>

David Carlisle wrote:
> 
> Nothing to do with old or new editors.  The editor I use is 
> more than capable of taking an input string of → 
> (or anything else I
> choose) and inserting the relevant unicode character or 
> character reference. However I don't want it to do that as 
> then it is much harder for people to edit the document (it's 
> easier for machines, but I care less about machines).


You are (rightly) restating that there is a user requirement out there.  I
am not denying the existence of that requirement.  The point I am making is
that the proposed solution doesn?t properly solve that requirement.

I believe that the problem should be regarded as a local problem of the
system where a document is visualized or edited, not as a representation
problem.  In other words, it is an application-level problem that should be
addressed by enhancing the software.

For example, if there is an existing document, encoded in UTF-8, that
contains a lot of "difficult" characters, some users may want to be able to
display/edit that document using character names (or with the assistance of
some user-interface thing that shows the name of the characters).  The
proposal does not address this use case.

On the other hand, if somebody creates a document, encoded in UTF-8+names,
that contains a lot of   & n b s p ;   & e a c u t e ;    pseudo-references
and other such bit patterns, some users may want to be able to display/edit
that document with those characters (or a subset of them) shown in their
usual Unicode display form.

Given an XML document, consisting in a given sequence of Unicode characters
(which are the same Unicode characters regardless of the encoding), why
should *my* visualization preferences affect the way *you* see the document?

Alessandro

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