[Cif2-encoding] Splitting of imgCIF and other sub-topics. .. .. .

[Bollinger, John C]

James,

On Thursday, September 16, 2010 8:54 AM, James Hester wrote:
[...]
>For my part, I think the IUCr could handle manuscript submissions as follows:

For the most part I think your suggestions are reasonable (and so I omit them), but I hope you will clarify one of them:

>(iii) UTF8 introduction can be staged relatively slowly, starting from
>allowing it in a few non-essential datanames (e.g. defining
>_author_name_native_script or somesuch).  Let's remember that on day 1
>everything can still be ASCII as the dictionaries will be able to
>restrict character sets to ASCII

Are you suggesting that the character encoding of individual data values be configurable in the dictionary?  I suspect and hope that where you wrote "UTF8", you meant something more like "Unicode" -- i.e. the set of allowed (literal) characters, not their encoding.  Is that right?

If UTF-8 emerges as the only permitted encoding for CIF2 then this will be a mainly semantic difference, but it nevertheless has implications for software design and behavior.  If UTF-8 does *not* emerge as the only permitted encoding for CIF2 then this will be a tremendous difference.


Best,

John
--
John C. Bollinger, Ph.D.
Department of Structural Biology
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital


Email Disclaimer:  www.stjude.org/emaildisclaimer