[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: MicroASCII proposal
MicroASCII sounds too 2010ish Let's call it NanoASCII ! Xmlizer On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 8:36 AM, rjelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> wrote: > 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. Syntactical sugar such > as K, Y and Z are no-brainers of course: I doubt that anyone will really > miss them. But more recent fads such J, W and U are better off treated as > presentation forms and taken care of by another layer: ASCII violates this > basic separation of concerns. Indeed, the whole lower-case is redundant. > > What about internationalization? Well, we often think that > internationalization requires *more* features than any one alphabet could > get away with, but it ain't necessarily so. Lets say we support Hebrew and > the other semitic languages, and use letters for digits. We can then get rid > of the hindu digits from ASCII too. > > We can learn from the world of computing too. In LISP S-expressions, the > parenthesis is all that is needed for grouping. So out goes {} and []. We > don't need the control characters either. With all this, we should be able > to get to 32 (2^5) characters: MicroASCII will have 1/8 the number of code > points taken up by usual ASCII bytes and therefore be 8 times faster to > parse and 8 times simpler to understand! This is enough of a speed up that > Moore's law can be restarted, at least for a year or two. Mobile phone > keyboards will be simplified. > > The other advantage is that it frees up many code points in the byte that > can be used for other purposes, such as sending around strings of nulls and > nils, which the database community has a voracious appetite for. We could > dedicate the whole of the codespace 0x90 -0xFF to different kinds of nulls > and nils and NELs. > > If someone did want other characters, I suppose we could insert them using a > convenient URL, such as > (-!http://www.unicode.org/tables/Unicode5.0/ampersand!-) > > > Cheers > RIC IELLIFFE > > _______________________________________________________________________ > > XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS > to support XML implementation and development. To minimize > spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. > > [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ > Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@lists.xml.org > subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@lists.xml.org > List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php > >
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