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Re: MicroASCII proposal

• From: jean-marie.gouarne@arsaperta.com
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:42:12 +0100 (CET)

----- "rjelliffe" <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> a écrit :

| One of the major complications in software is that there are simply
| too 
|  many characters. Think of how many hours (and reputations!) are
| lossed 
|  due to spelling errors, how many bugs due to typos, and the extra 
|  parsing costs. We need to move XML (and computing) away from this 
|  unfortunate legacy which are really just niche publishing
| "requirements" 
|  and which made SGML ultimately fail.
| 
|  In order to do this, I am proposing MicroASCII. This would restore 
|  ASCII to its Latin essentials and reduce the insane repeats.

As an example, we could remember the primary (pre-Unicode) Braille system, that allows the representation of any plain text with 2^^6 characters only.

The main (or only) drawback is the frequent need to reserve a few symbols for markup. For example the Braille codes used for the decimal digits designates letters, too; the disambiguation (in a mixed context) is done with a particular code (#001111 or #000001 according to the selected Braille dialect) that, when appearing as a word leading sign, means that the word is made of digits. Etc, etc.

So, for MicroASCII or any reduced character set, the best solution is always a trade-off between the need to reduce the character redundancy and the need to reduce the need of disambiguation markup. It depends on the (various) users' business vocabularies.

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: MicroASCII proposal
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>