Accent escape sequences
Joe Krahn krahn at niehs.nih.govTue Mar 6 00:25:59 GMT 2007
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Herbert J. Bernstein wrote: > The practical reality is that the "usual CIF markup" has been used > in a very large number of existing CIFs on the assumption that > plain text actually means text with that markup. I think we > should formalize that assumption for all quoted strings, making > the current usage "legal". Then for anything else: > > true plain text > CBF binary > TeX > XML > HTML > ... I was not sure how much the markup has been used because the mmCIF dictionaries, which I have been looking at, are essentially limited to the use of Greek letters, degree, and A-ring. In fact, the ring modifier is often omitted. Furthermore, mmCIF dictionaries have markup patterns intended not to be CIF-markup, such as the regular-expression patterns, and do not appear to have an indicator that these are not CIF-markup encoded. A MIME header indicating text/plain would be easy to add. There still needs to be a defined content type for CIF-markup, such as "text/x-cif-markup". It would be needed for a multipart/alternative that had CIF-markup as one type, even if not used elsewhere. > > we would use text fields and MIME appropriate headers. As with email > the burden would not fall on the general CIF parsers, except to the > limited extent of being able to reliably find the end of a text field, > and to deliver whatever was found within the text field to the > higher level application to parse further, if they choose to do > so. CIF writers could invert the path, requiring applications > to deliver properly wrapped MIME ready to put out as text fields. > The CIF writer would add the semicolon quotes, MIME boundary markers and the > content header. The application would be responsible for any additional > headers and the actual content as a byte stream. This division of > labor would allow most CIF software to have no changes in > write logic and only modest changes in read logic, but would allow > applications that need to deliver and to be aware of complex internal > semantics to do so in a CIF environment instead of having to move > over to XML. > The advantage of MIME is that a lot of thought was put into keeping a good balance features, flexibility, and backwards compatibility. It is, in my opinion, an excellent idea, even if imgCIF was not already using it.
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