[Advacs-discuss] Standards

[Oliver Elphick]

Let me stress that, so far, all theses "standards" are up for
discussion.  I've just put my own ideas up.  Once we agree them, though,
we will need to be consistent, so we need to get them right now, if we
can.

On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 11:08, Helmut Wollmersdorfer wrote:
> Documentation
> -------------
> 
> | 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.

I have no experience of it either.  I will go along with this if people
agree that it is a good thing.  What we will also need to know is what
tools to use to write for it; I like to use xemacs, but there are bugs
in the psgml code in that.  Is there a different module for xml?  Does
anybody know?

> Character Encoding
> ------------------
> 
> 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.

Yes for both, and I think Unicode is definitely the way to go.

> 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.

I noticed that there were strange characters showing; I suppose one has
to be in a UTF8 locale to read them properly.

This doesn't really affect British and American users much, since we
don't use accented characters, but most of the rest of the world will be
affected.  Should we assume that they know enough to get the display
right? or do we need to write extra explanations?

Oliver