[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]
Subject: RE: [office-comment] Text in OpenFormula - inadequate forinternational use
What about this. The standard is made Unicode compliant throughout. If enough users / developers want it (i.e. are prepared to put in the time to write it) then an appendix is added to the standard with a conformance profile for "ASCII only applications". This would be a strict subset of the standard. Do not call this "Not suitable for international sales." Remember that for some people the USA is international. ISO can omit this profile from it's version of the standard so that this profile is an Oasis standard but not an ISO standard. The reason we would do this is so that a number of existing applications can quickly bring out conforming applications which can interchange documents and whose documents can be read by ISO-ODF compliant applications. If there is no evidence that applications conforming to this profile are going to be produced then maybe it's better not to do produce this profile. OK? Joe -----Original Message----- From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:rjelliffe@allette.com.au] Sent: 06 May 2010 09:38 To: office-comment@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [office-comment] Text in OpenFormula - inadequate for international use David A. Wheeler wrote: > There are at least two encodings: > * Encodings of text at rest (stored in a document), which are handled by XML > * Encodings of text when stored in memory, inside an evaluator. This may not be, and is often NOT, the same. If an implementation uses 32 bits per character, then it can do easy random access. I don't know of any implementations that do this, but instead do all sorts of weird stuff. > > It shouldn't matter what encoding(s) an evaluator uses as long as it can get the right answer. But the encodings an evaluator supports determine whether they CAN get a right answer. First, are we talking repertoires or encodings? The repertoire relates to the set (bag) of characters allowed. The encoding relates to the mappings to various kinds of numbers (codepoints, bytes). David is saying, if I get it right, that the repertoire of characters allowed at certain points in OpenFormula should be limited to the capabilities of the 7-bit codespace available for characters in certain engines allegedly. This is perhaps the first time I have seen a standard that is not even finished (and therefore cannot have been implemented) be dragged down by legacy implementation issues :-) I am sure many eyebrows are being raised. One of the reasons non-Western countries participate in ISO is because it gives them a forum where their Internationalization concerns are put at center stage. This is an area where W3C is also very strong (because they have the I18n WG) but I think OASIS is not as strong, which is why ISO can have some constructive role to play in review. It is now 15 years since the game was over for IT standards that did not use Unicode: that anyone could in 2010 seriously consider a new standard which does not provide first-class Unicode support (if that is what is going on here) would be a travesty and a throwback. If this causes a problem for some engines, why isn't that a good thing? They are substandard or not suitable for the global market. *If* this is a real issue, one approach would be to make a conformance class "Not suitable for international sales." Then national procurement people will have a good objective basis for refusing to purchase those products for being substandard. I think it would be fiddly, and it would be simpler for vendors to simply say "we don't conform in this area yet." [[Another approach would be to allow a repertoire indicator (for example, tied in to ISO CRDL) so that a system can arrange the correct mapping tables to convert from the Unicode characters to the limited encoding in use. This is assuming that the issue is not that these systems support only 7-bit ASCII but that they only support 8-bit encodings (in which case, why couldn't they use UTF-8?)]] Another approach would be a non-normative note that says "NOTE: While OpenFormula allows any Unicode character at this point, some legacy spreadsheet engines developed for specific locales do not accept characters more than the customary characters of that locale: this issue has been reported for non-ASCII-repertoire characters." David: can you name names: which software actually has this problem? Cheers Rick Jellife -- This publicly archived list offers a means to provide input to the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC. In order to verify user consent to the Feedback License terms and to minimize spam in the list archive, subscription is required before posting. Subscribe: office-comment-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org Unsubscribe: office-comment-unsubscribe@lists.oasis-open.org List help: office-comment-help@lists.oasis-open.org List archive: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/ Feedback License: http://www.oasis-open.org/who/ipr/feedback_license.pdf List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php Committee: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office This email (and any attachment) is intended only for the attention of the addressee. It is STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL and may be legally privileged. If you have received it in error any disclosure distribution or copying of all or any part of the contents is prohibited. While virus checked by Hoare Lea, the recipient remains responsible for the consequences of any virus received.
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]