Evidently my diagnosis, that Frank da Cruz had insufficient experience in a
cross-platform environment, was completely wrong, so I apologize for
writing it.
It puzzles me even more, then, that Frank writes in his Unicode text file
proposal as if Unix practice, or more particularly his own practice
(including practice in file format conversions in cross-platform data
transfers), is normative, not just for other software, but for file formats
on other platforms, without saying how this norm is to be implemented so
that file format conversion ceases to be a problem for all applications.
Also:
How do we get agreement on such a standard from, e.g., Microsoft?
How do we get users to stop using current methods?
How do we deal with delimited database transfer files with a fixed limit on
line length?
How do we deal with legacy data?
I find myself dealing with Unicode text created by Windows and Windows
applications quite frequently now, with line ends marked in little-endian
fashion as
0D 00 0A 00
What do we do about that?
I entirely agree that cross-platform protocols should be defined so that we
stop having conversion problems (such as translating text file formats upon
transfer, as ftp does), but it can't be done within a character set
standard, nor by defining a text file format without file format handling
for applications on different platforms.
I have had to collect or in some cases write conversion routines for text
file transfer, including text files in ASCII, 8-bit character sets, and
Unicode. I would much rather have the operating systems do it. If someone
can explain to me how Frank's proposal will lead to that desired goal
better than Frank's proposal with my suggested amendments, I'll be happy to
go along. So can we discuss the issues now?
-- Edward Cherlin President Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Help outlaw Spam. <http://www.cauce.org/> Talk to us at <news:comp.org.cauce>
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