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Re: [ddlm-group] Community consulation regarding CIF2 encoding

Dear Colleagues,

   Unless we are assuming that the CIF2 transition is not acutally
going to happen, that transition is going to involve a wide range
of both software developers and users of crystallographic software
throughout the community.  Either we have te dicsussion with them
on a UTF-8-ony standard now, or we will have to have the discussion
with them later, when it is much harder and more expensive to
revise what we will have done.

   If James is reluctant to post his own summary to the lists, then
how about the following:

   COMCIFS, the IUCr Committee of the Maintenance of the CIF standard
is considering some important improvements and extensions to CIF.
Among the extensions being considered is enlarging the character
set allowed from simple ASCII to the full UNICODE character set
(the same set of characters used in web browsers with HTML and 
in XML).  There is strong disagreement on COMCIFS as to whether
this would best be done by mandating just a single UNICODE encoding,
UTF-8, or whether is would be best to follow the practives of HTML
and XML in allowing alternate encodings.  The full thread of the
discussion thus far can be seen at:

   http://www.iucr.org/__data/iucr/lists/ddlm-group/

Comments from interested members of the community would be
appreciated.

   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 Thu, 1 Jul 2010, SIMON WESTRIP wrote:

> I agree this would probably be more productive.
> 
> Perhaps the IUCr could point its authors at such a survey - via its CIF
> author services pages (printCIF, checkCIF...)?
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Simon
> 
> 
> ____________________________________________________________________________
> From: James Hester <jamesrhester@gmail.com>
> To: ddlm-group <ddlm-group@iucr.org>
> Sent: Thursday, 1 July, 2010 6:51:47
> Subject: [ddlm-group] Community consulation regarding CIF2 encoding
> 
> Dear DDLm-ers,
> 
> I think Herbert's suggestion of sending a version of my summary out is
> unlikely to produce a great deal of enlightenment, because I expect the
> range of responses to simply mirror that which we have already seen in this
> group, with no ultimate resolution.  I would like to propose instead a
> simple questionnaire that we can use to inform our decision.  The questions
> I would like to see answered are:
>  1. Do you regularly use non-ASCII characters when editing text?  Examples
>     of such characters include accented ASCII characters, and the characters
>     from Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic etc.  (Yes/No/Don't know)
>  2. What languages do you usually deal with when editing text?
>  3. What text editing programs do you usually use?
>  4. Can the text editors that you usually use read and write files in UTF-8
>     format? (yes/no/don't know)
>  5. Which non-ASCII encoding do you think would result in the least problems
>     when transferring your text files across the internet?
>  6. Would you object to a new CIF standard which allowed only UTF-8 encoded
>     files? If so, why?
>  7. Do you have any comments regarding suitable choice of encoding(s) for
>     the new CIF standard?
> Once we have fine-tuned the questions, I would suggest creating the survey
> using www.surveymonkey.com, then posting requests for responses wherever
> crystallographers are to be found, but especially in groups where non ASCII
> scripts are likely to be found (European Crystallographic Society, Japanese
> Crystallographic Society, Computing Commission etc.).
> 
> James.
> --
> T +61 (02) 9717 9907
> F +61 (02) 9717 3145
> M +61 (04) 0249 4148
> 
>
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