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

[James Hester]

Hi John: you are correct, I indeed meant Unicode, not UTF8, and
certainly would not want to allow control over encoding to be defined
on a per-item basis.

I am working on a response to your most recent proposal, but
considerable research is required.  I'll try not to make it a
blockbuster this time!

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 1:48 AM, Bollinger, John C
<John.Bollinger at stjude.org> wrote:
> 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
>
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