Subject: (i18n.175) Re: request for feedback on character set identification proposal

From: [email-masked] (Walt Daniels)
Date: 08 Sep 1992 10:54:39 EDT

>It's highly regrettable that IBM has neglected to register their
>character sets with ISO, since they do have a comprehensive Character
>Data Representation Architecture (CDRA) which is quite intelligently
>designed.
> Erik Naggum

Perhaps we are lucky that we have fewer characters sets that we must
deal with.  :-)

I am not an SGML expert so what follow may not make complete sense if
the following assumption is not true.

Assumption: SGML requires that it be encoded in ISO 2022.

Erik's solution to the codeset problem for SGML is to register more
codesets.  I would prefer a solution that registered only one more
codeset, ISO 10646 level 3.  Even better would be to change SGML to
allow (require) ISO 10646.

ISO 10646 is the most complete registry of names we have and it will
become more complete as rarer scripts are added.  I would suggest that
we should revisit all the existing codesets and respecify them as
their mapping to ISO 10646.  We should strongly resist the creation of
any new codesets.

SGML documents specify the mapping from codesets to "glyphs in fonts".
The "glyphs in fonts" have their own naming scheme registered with
AFII.  I suggest that this too should be replaced with strong ties to
ISO 10646.  Thus instead of allowing a font like Helvetica to contain
both Capital-A and Illuminated-Capital-A (at different indices), we
should require the creation of a new font, Helvetica-Illuminated, to
contain the varients and use the codepoints as direct indices to
address the font info.  Thus Illuminated would be just another SGML
attribute like Italic.