Subject: [Ltru] Special characters (was: Re: Expanding the xx..yy ranges)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:40:39 -0600

Gerard Meijssen <gerard dot meijssen at gmail dot com> wrote:

> In Unix characters like slashes and pipes have a special purpose. When 
> the name of a language is used as the title of a webpage, it often 
> happens that as a consequence the page cannot be displayed. When the 
> name of the article is another Unicode character, it does not have the 
> same meaning and consequently the problem is just not there.
>
> It is by insisting on ASCII and the use of characters that are used 
> for
> special purposes that this problem exists.

For reference, the "special" characters used in ISO 639-3 for the 
African click letters are !, /, and =.

As a long-time user of Unix-like command-line tools at the DOS and 
Windows command prompt, two environments whose concepts of "special 
characters" often conflict, I've become quite sensitive to this type of 
problem.  But in 14 years using the Web, I've never heard of a system 
that wouldn't display a page because the *title* included !, /, or =.

To test Gerard's claim, I put up a simple Web page at 
http://www.ewellic.org/chars.html which displays all printable ASCII 
characters except A-Z, a-z, and 0-9 (which should be beyond doubt) in 
the title, heading, and body text.  I invite everyone to try to display 
this page using their favorite operating system and browser.

> The reason for using what is the code for a language is because the 
> code is the only non changing unique part of the registration of a 
> language. These codes are not only unique to this registry, they are 
> also used in the ISO-639-3. When you make something unique in this 
> way, you invite people to take these codes seriously.

I don't understand what this has to do with Unix metacharacters used in 
Description fields.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ

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From: "Phillips, Addison" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:59:20 -0700

And, of course, the click letters are separately encoded in Unicode. You could use those characters instead of their ASCII analogs (U+01C0 through U+01C3)... not that I'm proposing to do so. But that is apropos of nothing: the special characters in question (and others not mentioned) should be perfectly acceptable in descriptions and comments.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On
> Behalf Of Doug Ewell
> Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 9:41 PM
> To: LTRU Working Group
> Subject: [Ltru] Special characters (was: Re: Expanding the xx..yy
> ranges)
>