Charset/CCDD (was: Let's develop an open-source media archive standard)

Am 11 Aug 2004 17:41 meinte Vintage Computer Festival: Well, yes and no. Shure, a lot of the most common codes are to some extend US-ASCII compatible, but different, thus even the use of a stric 7 Bit ASCII doesn't save us from complications. But beside that, it's not the point. Especialy when allowing the inclusion of binary data, and/or when switching between systems, ASCII can become incompatible. Further more, such a definition (US-ASCII only) would make it quite hard to use the format in a mainframe environment, wher EBCDIC is still the language of choice. Already on a PET we have differences in the 7 Bit encodeing. Not to mention the even bigger problems to handle these files on real old systems. Rather then restricting the encodeing of the XML file to a specific charset, we need to restrict the USAGE within the standard to certain characters, regardless of the encodeing. I suggest to restrict the caracters used in tags, attribute names and attributes to 'A-Z' (uppercase), '0-9' and '-'. these are to be found in all character sets I've seen up to date, and thus able to tunnel whatever needed. For various data encodeing schemes additional characters may be needed. By restricting our definition to this, we become independant so transparent to all code conversions that may happen on the way between machines. Gruss H. -- VCF Europa 6.0 am 30.April und 01.Mai 2005 in Muenchen http://www.vcfe.org/