Re: [office] Fwd: [odf-devel] ODF & ITS

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Charles,

Charles-H.Schulz wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Since ITS is still a W3C working draft, there is certain room for
>>collaboration here.  IMHO, if a W3C TC is thinking about the impact of
>>their draft standard on ODF, then this is a good thing and should be
>>encouraged, perhaps by assigning a liaison to work with them.  This
>>isn't among what I consider our immediate concerns, but is certainly
>>something worth tracking for the longer term.
>>    
>>
>
>+1. I would like to point out a related issue here. If we wish to
>discuss i18n concerns, we also may want to address them in terms of the
>encoding inside ODF. Being an XML format, ODF uses the utf-8 by default.
>Now utf-8 may or may not suit certain usage needs and perequisites,
>depending on where you live on the globe and depending on what you wish
>to do with the ODF.
>In theory, if you use an encoding that is different from utf-8 the xml
>files will get broken and so will be the entire document (at least it
>won't be human readable). That said, it is not always the case.
>Maybe we should try to see what could be done in regard of ODF and
>'unorthodox' encodings.
>If someone has an idea here, feel free to comment.
>
>  
>
Not sure there is much we can do. XML parsers are only required to 
support UTF-8 and UTF-16. Many support other encodings but are not 
required to do so.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/, 2.2 Characters: "All XML 
processors MUST accept the UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings of Unicode 3.1"

If we stray outside of UTF-8 or UTF-16, that increases the likelihood 
that documents will break, depending upon the XML processor.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

>Regards,
>
>  
>

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Patrick@Durusau.net
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!