Re: [office-comment] Text in OpenFormula - inadequate for internationaluse

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Alex,

Just to clarify:

Are you saying that ODF 1.2 should make it impossible for evaluators 
that only support ASCII to claim conformance to ODF 1.2?

Evaluators that only support ASCII may be of limited appeal but that is 
a market question and not a standards one.

ODF 1.2 does not standardize ASCII, that was done by prior standards. 
ODF 1.2 is simply recognizing that some evaluators may conform to 
earlier character set standards.

I don't understand why recognizing existing applications, prior 
standards and conformance to them is problematic?

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

On 5/5/2010 6:45 AM, Alex Brown wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> 3.2 Text:
>
> ----
> A text value (also called a string value) is a sequence of zero or more characters.
>
> Evaluators should accept [UNICODE] strings, but shall accept strings of ASCII (Unicode U+0020 through U+007F, inclusive) characters.
> ----
>
> Consider an ODF document, which contains a spreadsheet cell with an accented character (e-acute say), and a string function operating on that cell.
>
> By the above text, it appears a conforming OpenFormula implementation need not accept such a document, since only ASCII support is required.
>
> If so, I think it is unacceptable for an international standard (any standard, frankly) not to have basic support for international text required as a basic required provision. If a group of people wish to have a private agreement to use a ASCII only, then they might do that (and such usage would be compatible with full Unicode, so we lose nothing by this) - but such parochial western-biased usages should not be standardized.
>
> A thorough pass should be made of the text to remove references to ASCII text (except for legacy purposes) and rebase text representation and handling on Unicode.
>
> - Alex.
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System.
> For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email
> ______________________________________________________________________
>    

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)