[Cif2-encoding] Revised Motion

[James Hester]

Hi everybody:

I think it is fair to say that we are all agreed on the broad principle of
the compromise position I proposed recently.  The current lack of consensus
I interpret as a desire for a bit of technical polish.

One reason for the disparity is that my proposal was implicitly expressed in
terms of a new paragraph to be added to our current 'Changes' document that
is posted at
http://www.iucr.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/41426/cif2_syntax_changes_jrh20100705.pdf.
Yesterday, Herbert and I (for no particular reason) discussed the changes in
the context of Herbert's motion, which I had interpreted as largely
repeating the content of that 'Changes' document, with the exception of the
encoding paragraphs.  I was not aware that there were any other
controversial sections of Herbert's motion.  My expectation is that we would
accept (or decline) Herbert's motion as a joint statement of our position,
and then rework the 'Changes' document accordingly.

Herbert: I notice (now) that the paragraph immediately preceding the
paragraph that we changed could be interpreted as conflicting with the new
paragraph that you and I wrote, because it appears to cover the whole code
point range.   Could I suggest that it be replaced by the following:

It is understood that CIF2 documents may
be constructed and maintained on computers that implement other character
encodings.  For maximum portability only the clearly
identified equivalents to the Unicode characters identified above and
below should be used and use of UTF-8 for a concrete representation is
highly recommended.  However, for compatibility with CIF1 behaviour, there
is no formal
restriction on the encoding of CIF2 files providing they contain only code
points from the ASCII range.

Regarding the meaning of 'text': in the 'Changes' document, there is a
section for definitions where I think we can define 'text' if we so wish;
personally I think that writing 'plain text' instead of 'text' would be
sufficient.

On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 12:01 AM, Bollinger, John C <
John.Bollinger at stjude.org> wrote:

>
> On Thursday, September 30, 2010 8:40 AM, Herbert J. Bernstein wrote:
> >   James and I had a good e-meeting and came up with the following
> >revised wording.  If anybody objects to this motion, please speak
> >up now.
>
> With apologies, I object.  This proposal has exactly the same problem that
> options (1) and (2) did: it does not define "text file".  It is worse in
> this case, however, because the problem cannot be fixed merely by adding
> Herbert's definition (or mine).  In most environments that definition does
> not encompass UTF-8 encoded text containing non-ASCII characters, so the
> recommendation to use UTF-8 implies some other, ill-defined definition.
>
> I am quite surprised that the result presented is so different from James's
> recent compromise proposal, which seemed poised to serve as the basis for a
> consensus result.  Perhaps a viable solution would be to include a
> definition of "text file" derived from that proposal.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> John
> --
> John C. Bollinger, Ph.D.
> Department of Structural Biology
> St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
>
>
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>
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