Neil Jennings writes: | | The abc 2.0 draft has the following | | %%abc-charset iso-8859-1 (or other iso code)
Well, yes, but that doesn't seem to have a well-defined scope. Does it apply to the whole file? If I have a text that's mixed Russian and Yiddish (not a hypothetic case), how do I indicate which parts are in which character set? Also, there's a potentially very serious gotcha with this sort of charset indicator: What if I copy the file to another machine (perhaps via a browser, or maybe with a file-copy program), and it decides to rewrite the file to a native charset on the new machine. It will, of course, translate the above %% line to the new charset, but it will still claim that the text is iso-8859-1, and that's now wrong. It's sorta like the old logic-class question of how to correctly translate a sentence like "This sentence is in English" into, say, French. If you translate it as "Cette phrase est en anglais", you have the interesting problem that the original sentence was true but the translation is false. One could argue that a translation that doesn't preserve truth value is not really a correct translation. Or is it? This is an inherent problem with self-referential statements, as is the above %% line. This apparently applies to the problems I've seen with OSX. I use rsync to keep a number of directories, including my web site, in sync on a number of different machines. This works quite well with the linux and *BSD machines, but screws up rather badly on OSX due to some of the changes in the file system. A later use of rsync then propagates the screwups back to the linux and *BSD machines. I can imagine a system that converts all incoming "text" files to UTF-8 or UTF-16. You couldn't very well expect a file-transfer program to understand all such comments in all kinds of files and translate them properly. It's unlikely that the programmers will have ever heard of abc. So on such a system, the above %% line would end up being incorrect and misleading. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
