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Re: [ddlm-group] Summary of encoding discussion so far. .. .



On Monday, June 28, 2010 7:02 PM, SIMON WESTRIP wrote:

>John wrote:
>"The person or organization that wants to accept only UTF-8 (or perhaps other discernable encodings) in order to reduce the perceived or real likelihood of misidentified encodings is under any circumstances free to do so.  The standard neither helps them by requiring UTF-8 alone, nor hinders them by permitting other encodings."
>
>I think that 'person or organization' is very likely to value what might hinder its users over what might hinder them.

I don't doubt that's so, but NO ONE is helped by a formal constraint that they cannot rely upon being consistently obeyed in practice.

>By requiring a single or inherently identifiable set of encodings and providing tools to implement them,
>I think we would be helping users far more than saying please specify your encoding as well as prepare your CIF
according to all the other restrictions of the standard and the dictionaries, when in many cases they would not be
>readily aware of the encoding they are using nor even consider understanding CIF
>as an important part of their work? I can only speak from experience - other's experience will probably differ.

Nothing prevents IUCr, PDB, CCDC, Herb, James, or anyone else from providing a set of CIF tools that produces, for example, only UTF-8 output.  None of the multi-encoding proposals obligate anyone to use or support the entire range of allowed encodings.


Regards,

John

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