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Re: [ddlm-group] THREAD 3: The alphabet of non-delimited strings.

That would be my reading of the prudent thing to do, which is why I agree
with James on the need to deprecate, rather than to make drastic changes
immediately.  --Herbert

=====================================================
  Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
    Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
         Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769

                  +1-631-244-3035
                  yaya@dowling.edu
=====================================================

On Sun, 11 Oct 2009, SIMON WESTRIP wrote:

> So in general, the policy should be that any changes that invalidate existing CIFs
should only be allowed if absolutely necessary and only using the deprecated approach -
i.e. options such as 1.2 and 2.3 should not in fact be options at this stage?

Cheers

Simon




________________________________
From: Herbert J. Bernstein <yaya@bernstein-plus-sons.com>
To: Group finalising DDLm and associated dictionaries <ddlm-group@iucr.org>
Sent: Saturday, 10 October, 2009 21:58:03
Subject: Re: [ddlm-group] THREAD 3: The alphabet of non-delimited strings.

Dear Colleagues,

    There are multiple communities out there.

    There are, of course, the internal IUCr and PDB uses of CIF.

    For small molecule work, there are well-established CIF-based workflows 
using DDL1-based CIFS.  There is a very large base of exsting files, and
write logic.   There would be great value in the DDLm-based validation
for this community, but if we make it difficult and confusing, DDLm
will simply be ignored.  If we make writers for CIFs that cannot be read
by the base of exsiting software, those writers will not be used.

    For macromolecular structural work, there is very little adoption of 
DDL2-based CIF outside of the software base controlled by the PDB, so
there is it feasible to try to make signficant changes, but for the
rapidly growing imgCIF DDL2-based software, changes that have not been
discussed with the detector community and vetted by them will, as with the
small molecule community, simply be ignored.

    In addition, there are many idosyncratic uses of CIF, e.g. in the 
"harvest" mode for macromolecular experiments that have their own 
softare base and user community, and are simply not going to be told
what to do.

    There are sundry and assorted CIF software packages standing alone and
embedded in applications, for which the delvelopers and maintainers have
no particular need of desire to change anything, and who are not
conerned about data validation, and who are going to continue to read
what they currently read and, more importantly, write what they currently
write, no matter what COMCIFS says.

    There is much more to this, but the bottom line is, if we want to make
changes and improvements, we need to talk to and involved a fairly broad
sampling of a variety of communities, or we will meet very stiff 
resistance.

    Because of this, I think it would be best to work on clean well-defined
proposals with solid upwards and downwards migration plans, and then to
have workshops to get community feedback.

    Regards,
      Herert

=====================================================
   Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
     Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
          Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769

                   +1-631-244-3035
                   yaya@dowling.edu
=====================================================

On Sat, 10 Oct 2009, SIMON WESTRIP wrote:

> Dear all

Before this thread diverges into a deeper discussion of UTF-8 and unicode, 
can I ask for clarification of a few points.

As an observer, seems to me that this thread has been 'stumbling' because 
of some fundamental issues with respect to

adopting DDLm. I now find myself questioning my understanding of the 
situation. At the risk of sounding as if I'm just repeating some of the 
recent comments from Brian and James (or indeed that I shouldnt have been 
asked to listen in at all), I've been observing these discussions under 
the assumption that:

1) it was already accepted that CIF1.2 is going to have to be treated as a 
distinct format, requiring new CIF1.2-enabled software. The new software 
should be backwards-compatible - able to read/write CIF1.1 if required. 
This is not an uncommon scenario (e.g. in the world of word-processing 
software - the latest format will not be readable by programs written for 
the previous formats, but programs supporting the latest format will be 
able to convert between the old and new). This is an acceptable annoyance 
if the new format markedly enhances the old format?

2) The general aim is to make the transition between the old and new as 
painless as possible, but not at the expense of realizing the benefits of 
the new?

3) The sooner the specs for the new are made available the better - so 
that developers can at least keep them in mind when they work on their 
projects - whether it be a fully fledged CIF reader/writer, or a program 
that just accepts CIF as a data source.

Forgive me if I'm off the mark with my assumptions, or if I'm going over 
ground you've already covered (being a newcomer, I'm afraid I may not be 
up to speed on all this, though as someone who may well be involved in 
implementing whatever is decided upon, even my ignorance may be of use to 
you when it comes to considerations of how the changes may be handled by 
interested parties).

Cheers

Simon

Simon P. Westrip






________________________________
From: Herbert J. Bernstein <yaya@bernstein-plus-sons.com>
To: Group finalising DDLm and associated dictionaries <ddlm-group@iucr.org>
Sent: Saturday, 10 October, 2009 18:02:35
Subject: Re: [ddlm-group] THREAD 3: The alphabet of non-delimited strings.

Yes, most modern Fortrans cannot tell the difference between UTF-8 and 
ascii.

=====================================================
    Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
      Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
           Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769

                    +1-631-244-3035
                   yaya@dowling.edu
=====================================================

On Sat, 10 Oct 2009, Brian McMahon wrote:

> Dear Herbert
>
> Thanks for the clarification. I've now read
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
> :-)
>
> It seems to me that the STAR spec still needs to be modified to
> state explicitly that its allowed character set is Unicode as
> expressed in UTF-8 encoding.
>
> I note also from the above Wikipaedia entry that there is some
> latitude in practices for handling invalid byte sequences (and to some
> extent invalid code points). I think we should consider whether the
> full STAR/CIF1.2 specs should formalise exception handling procedures
> in such cases.
>
> Regards
> Brian
>
> PS Just for my own information, does the statement
>  > For the point of view of any
>  > C-program intended to work with the 256-chacacter ISO characters sets,
>  > a UTF-8 string handles just the same as an ISO string.
> hold equally well for modern Fortran applications?
>
> On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 12:01:05PM -0400, Herbert J. Bernstein wrote:
>> Dear Colleagues,
>>
>>    There is a misundertsanding about UTF-8.  For the point of view of any
>> C-program intended to work with the 256-chacacter ISO characters sets,
>> a UTF-8 string handles just the same as an ISO string.  The major
>> differences are that the bottom 128 characters are the US national variant
>> we call ASCII, and the second 128 characters that in the past would have
>> had the accented and special characters needs to handle the western
>> European languages in an ASCII environment have been replaced with the
>> variable length encodings for a 31 bit character set.  That is what is
>> nice about UTF8 -- it is actually using what should be printable
>> characters to do its encoding, avoiding anything that looks like
>> binary data.
>>
>>    UTF-16/UCS-2 is different.  There you have a lot that looks like binary
>> when working in an ascii world, and you need special libraries (for wide
>> characters) to deal with them, unless you are working in java or with a
>> browser, where that is the native encoding.
>>
>>    We are in the midst of a painful, worldwide transition in which we have
>> a mixture of:
>>
>>    1.  The code code-page based character encodings based on the multiple
>> ISO national variants.  ASCII is just the US national variant.
>>    2.  The UTF-16/UCS-2 version of unicode heavily adopted by many hardware
>> vendors and used as the native encoding in many operating systems and all
>> browsers
>>    3.  The UTF-8 version of unicode, extensively adopted in Linux-based
>> applications and slowly being accepted in almost all operating systems.
>>
>> My guess is that by 10 years from now, UTF-8 will have been fairly
>> completely adopted except for some legacy java and browser UCS-2
>> stuff.
>>
>>    My suggestion would be to try to support ascii, UCS-2 and UTF-8 for the
>> moment and work towards joining the march towards UTF-8.
>>
>>    Regards,
>>      Herbert
>>
>> =====================================================
>>   Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
>>     Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
>>          Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769
>>
>>                   +1-631-244-3035
>>                  yaya@dowling.edu
>> =====================================================
>>
>> On Sat, 10 Oct 2009, Brian McMahon wrote:
>>
>>> Regarding the adoption of the Unicode character set, I agree that
>>> this would make it easier to accommodate accented and non-Latin
>>> characters and symbols, and I see no reason to oppose implementing
>>> it as a UTF-8 encoding, and so I vote 3.2.
>>>
>>> (It's not a panacea, especially for maths, where new symbols can
>>> always be invented, and one must be able to specify a two-dimensional
>>> layout as well as just the glyphs, so we shall still need other
>>> approaches for various types of "rich" text.)
>>>
>>> However, this is a binary encoding, is it not, and so the underlying
>>> STAR specification must be modified to accommodate this. (I'm afraid
>>> I haven't got Nick's draft paper for the revised STAR specification
>>> to hand, so I apologise if that's already been addrressed.)
>>>
>>> Does it raise issues of endian-ness? If we are introducing binary
>>> encodings, are there any reasons to restrict the character set
>>> encoding to UTF-8 or should one also allow UTF-16 etc. (i) in STAR
>>> and (ii) in CIF? And, ultimately, is there a prospect of extending
>>> the STAR spec in a way that properly accommodates at least the CBF
>>> implementation, and possibly other binary data incorporation?
>>>
>>> I am happy in this case that handling by "old" CIF software can
>>> be done by adopting a protocol that allows UTF-8 Unicode characters
>>> to be represented by ASCII encodings such as \u27. (I don't think
>>> that we need specify a protocol at this point, just be sure that
>>> one can be defined if needed.)
>>>
>>> I again draw attention to the amusing fact that with an ASCII
>>> Unicode encoding, "O\u27Neill" is a valid data value under the
>>> current proposals, whereas the UTF-8 equivalent would not be,
>>> because the UTF-8 encoding of ' is just ' !
>>>
>>> Brian
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> ddlm-group mailing list
>>> ddlm-group@iucr.org
>>> http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/ddlm-group
>>>
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