Bruno Haible wrote on 2001-01-29 19:32 UTC:
> Which is the standards body where we could submit such a proposal?
ECMA-48 was the traditional place to handle such things, but ECMA/TC1
(coded character sets) seems not to be active at the moment according to
http://www.ecma.ch/.
A (quite large) project that might really be worthwhile doing is to
author a concise video terminal standard. It should be
- inspired by and as far as feasible (but not religiously!) backwards
compatible to VT100, xterm, and ECMA-48/ISO 6429
- cut out all the exotic stuff of ISO 6429 that was never widely used
or widely understood and translate the rest of ISO 6429 from
Committeese into English
- cut down the state of the terminal to the absolute minimum
(no fancy mode for every little item the old committees couldn't
agree on, one single character encoding: UTF-8, etc.)
- make the document easy to read and a useful reference for the
programmer (ISO 6429 really fails here)
- take into account that charcell hardware isn't used any more today
(except to boot an IBM PC compatible perhaps) and therefore provide
useful features that are easy to implement with pixel frame buffers
(character overstriking, etc.)
- define exact behaviour for some well-defined Unicode subset that seems
feasible for implementation on charcell terminals (not sure whether
this will include the Indic scripts in the first version), including
aspects such as wcwidth()
- keep it simple
Text terminals (today mostly in the form of software emulators) are a
simple yet highly functional, versatile and time proven technology that
is in my opinion here to stay and that deserves to be maintained and
updated for a long time to come. More complicated GUI protocols such as
X11 or the Win32 graphics API have demonstrated to be inadequate in
providing simple and efficient user interfaces for expert users (system
administrators, technicians, developers).
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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