[Advacs-discuss] Standards

[Helmut Wollmersdorfer]

Documentation
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| Where possible, documentation should be written in SGML for the
| Docbook dtd.

Should we choose docbook-xml? In writing man pages I experienced 
problems like defining a character encoding explicitely. I googled 
around nearly one day to solve this problem. The only thing I learned 
was, that docbook-xml should be preferred.

I have only experience in using docbook-sgml. But if docbook-xml is well 
supported by debian-packaging utilities, we should use xml.

Character Encoding
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We definitely should only support UTF-8. This means that everyting is 
either "true" (7-bit) ASCII as this is compatible with UTF-8; or it is 
interpreted as UTF-8.

I don't know, how well this is supported by Python or Eiffel. But I 
assume, that they can handle it in character functions.

Up to now all my files in CVS are in UTF-8. I can convert them back to 
ISO-8859-1 if necessary. But this would mean that we maintain a table 
with default encodings for each language, and develop functions and 
scripts for proper handling of different encodings.

Helmut Wollmersdorfer