RFC: Description text in packages

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mardi 16 décembre 2008 à 20:38 +0200, Nikolay Vladimirov a écrit :

> >> >  Currently, I'm opposed to having a Guideline that mandates UTF-8 over ASCII.
> +1
> 
> It's not piles of quirks it's a simple parser.

ROTFL. Sorry. 

> Take wiki syntax for example. All wikis(i know) rely on simple syntax
> that uses ASCII characters to display somewhat structured and
> formatted content.

Wiki support UTF-8 just fine

> And it's common to use "*" to mark unordered list.

And it's common to use xml tags and all kinds of other stuff but that's
irrelevant because spec syntax is plain text not wiki markup.

> And also different languages have different types of quotes for
> example in Bulgarian the quoted text looks like this : ,, quote " .

Converting text to the appropriate typography rules and symbols is part
of the job of the translator (just like applying the correct grammar and
syntax ordering rules). Translating has never been limited to
word-by-word conversion.

> And if someone wants to translate the package summary he must go
> trough the UTF symbol table to find the specific quote symbol.

If someone does not have the quote symbols appropriate to his language
in his keyboard layout he should get the maintainer of this layout to
fix it.

> This can be simply solved with a parser.

It can not. Unicode is a monster but people jumped on it because it was
still simpler than all the parsers and quirks and “smart” parser rules
that antedated it.

> The representation should be different from the content.

This is not representation this is text encoding.
Chosing the font style and size is representation.

> And if a machine will display some text to a person then machine code
> must be written.

And the spec to write machine code in this context is plain text that
uses the UTF-8 standard.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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