>>>>> "Martin" == Martin Duerst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Martin> At 17:29 05/05/07, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> On May 4, 2005, at 04:39, Martin Duerst wrote:
>>> For free-flowing text, however, the line breaks in the source
>>> and those in the display are not (necessarily) the same, and
>>> so linebreaks have to be changed to spaces for Western
>>> languages, but to nothing for Chinese/Japanese (and most
>>> possibly to a zero-width non-breaking space for Thai), and the
>>> spec has to say something about this.
>> Why would you put line breaks in the CJK source, then? Isn't
>> the
Martin> "problem" solved with the least heuristics by the producer
Martin> not putting breaks there?
Martin> People in China, Japan, and so on (Korean uses spaces, so
Martin> it's not CJK) tend to use similar tools to those in the
Martin> western world. Tools for editing XML, e.g., usually don't
Martin> make it easy to edit very long lines because they assume
Martin> that such long lines can be broken. So it's not as easy as
Martin> it looks for the producer.
My personal opinion as someone who is very shortly going to have to
evaluate the atom specification is that you've identified an issue
(space and line breaking) for some languages that should be
considered. Your proposed solution seems highly undesirable in that
it requires us to understand the language of the text being displayed.
In the past we've had all sorts of problems doing that. Your proposed
solution also seems quite complicated.
It may well be that the solutions to this problem are worse than the
problem itself. However I think it is important to specifically
understand that is the case rather than failing to solve the problem
because we failed to understand it.
At least based on the discussion the IESG has been copied on, it
doesn't sound like the working group has fully considered this issue.
The responses have more of the character of those found from people
trying to brush aside an issue than of people who have carefully
considered something and concluded there is nothing to be done.
Moreover, thisn issue cannot be unique to atom: it must effect many
XML based protocols both within the IETF and within other standards
organizations.
It may be that the right people haven'tspoken up or that the right
part of the discussion hasn't been copied to the IESG. I'd sort of
expect the apps ADs and atompub chairs to be familiar with these
issues but so far have not seen them chime in.
Anyway as someone evaluating atompub's output it would be very useful
if the working group responded to this last call comment. IN my mind
a response would start with a researched description of the issue:
either confirm that Chinese and Japanese and Thai tools work as
described or explain how they actually work. Then describe what other
standards have done about this problem. Finally describe what atompub
has done about the problem and why.
I'm not asking for a lot of text; probably something about as long as
this message.
Such a response would make evaluating this issue much easier when the
document comes before the IESG.
