Subject: RE: [Ltru] XML registries now available

From: "McDonald, Ira" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 08:52:22 -0800

Hi Doug,

Yes, using only XML elements was exactly what I had in mind.
Mixing XML attributes with XML elements to contain the data
has no practical advantages and makes the XML much harder
to parse.

Looking forward in this thread, Frank's right, you can't
put XML with non-ASCII characters in an RFC.  Period.
It's IESG policy we're not going to change for our RFC.

That specifically means also not using so-called upper-half
ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) characters.  They are NOT permitted
in RFCs.

So if Aland needs it's ring in the registry, we still need
some more mechanism.

Proposal - since it only affects one field (native name of
language in UTF-8), what about having a parallel list (a
second Informative registry file) that has the pairs of
transcribed ASCII name and native language name?

Using XML seems to be considered here mainly as a codespace
solution for non-ASCII names (which is NOT a good reason for
using XML).

Cheers,
- Ira

PS - That second file would be Informative (even in the IANA
Registry) so that this WG list doesn't become a poor man's
ISO Registration/Maintenance Authority - it's best effort.

Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI  49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: [email-masked]

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On
Behalf Of Doug Ewell
Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2005 9:35 PM
To: LTRU Working Group
Subject: [Ltru] XML registries now available

I've uploaded a couple of XML versions of the registry, again just so
everyone can visualize what they would look like.

One is in Addison's original "back of the envelope" format, at
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/lstreg-addison.xml:

<subtag type="language" value="aa" date="2004-07-06">
  <description>Afar</description>
</subtag>

while the other uses XML elements exclusively instead of attributes,
which may or may not have been what Ira McDonald had in mind, at
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/lstreg-ira.xml:

<subtag>
  <type>language</type>
  <value>aa</value>
  <description>Afar</description>
  <date>2004-07-06</date>
</subtag>

These are only up for illustration, not for advocacy.  Personally I
liked the old vertical-bar format, but if the group would prefer to see
a change, that's fine.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 20:48:15 +0200

> put XML with non-ASCII characters in an RFC.  Period.

Wait a moment, that's the interesting point about XML, you can
use us-ascii in the document with character references like
&#229; - the W3C now prefers hex. (C048), but that's a "no-BC"
idea for (X)HTML.

You can also define symbolic character references on the fly
like <!ENTITY Aring "&#x00E5;"> or "include" these symbolic
definitions found in another public DTD / ENT file.

> solution for non-ASCII names (which is NOT a good reason for

For the very simple structure needed here it's the only pro-XML
argument I can think of.  We both don't want XML, but apparently
for different reasons.
                          Bye, Frank

---

From: "Jon Hanna" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 20:00:31 +0100

> &#229; - the W3C now prefers hex. (C048), but that's a "no-BC"

In practice only for HTML, with XHTML if that's causing you BC problems so
will a whole lot else.

Regards,
Jon Hanna
Work: <http://www.selkieweb.com/>
Play: <http://www.hackcraft.net/>
Chat: <irc://irc.freenode.net/selkie>

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 21:28:39 +0200

Jon Hanna wrote:

>> &#229; - the W3C now prefers hex. (C048), but that's a
>> "no-BC" idea for (X)HTML.

> In practice only for HTML, with XHTML if that's causing
> you BC problems so will a whole lot else.

IMHO XHTML 1.0 transitional is the best available HTML 3.2 for
new "BC" pages.  My vintage 1997 browser generally loves it as
long as I stay away from <del>.

It's only sad that there's no similar later XHTML version for
new simple "BC" pages, where I can avoid almost all legacy
markup except from a few cases of align= and name=, and maybe
bgcolor= together with the color= part of <font>.

Very off topic, pro forma on topic:  IANA publishs many of its
registries as (X)HTML pages, and if the future registry will be
a <pre>...</pre> part of an (X)HTML page no matter what we do,
then plain text us-ascii solutions at any cost instead of XML
would be a dubious idea.
                         Bye, Frank