11 Aug
2004
11 Aug
'04
12:41 p.m.
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Vintage Computer
Festival once stated:
Nope. XML files can be represented in multiple character sets, possibly
including (but certainly not limited to):
<snip!>
XML is more a more "current" technology
but I was trying to keep with the
platform neutrality by sticking to text-only and not assuming the use of any
other technology like XML.
XML is platform neutral because it's basically ASCII, right?
Best decide this now.
Ok, I choose US-ASCII. This will be up for debate I'm sure, but surely
US-ASCII is the most widely deployed character set in the world currently?
You might also want to investigate the work on Atom
(a blogging archive/API format in XML) where they are having to deal with an
explostion of character encoding schemes (for a sample of what they're
doing, read http://intertwingly.net/stories/2004/04/14/i18n.html).
You might be missing the point of what we're doing here. We're not
encapsulating textfiles. We're encapsulating binary data inside
textfiles.
My recomendation if you use XML? Mandate the
following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>
and be done with the mess that is character encoding.
I never considered anything else, really.
Also, the more
explicit you are in labling the data, the better. So, for instance:
<sector bit-encoding="mfm" encoding="text/base64"> ...
</sector>
where "bit-encoding" is the format used to encode the data on the physical
disk, and "encoding" is the format used *in the archive* of the data. Just
an example, but the more metadata you include, the better.
Well, those are confusing tags. Which is used for the disk encoding and
which is used for the imagefile encoding? Sure, if you have the spec you
can refresh yourself if you forget, but it's not absolutely obvious to
someone who doesn't have the spec.
Anyway, point taken.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]