[FWD] [I18n] Proposal for withdrawing Xutf8*() APIs

[Edward Lee <edward.@kimo.com>]

  OK, Markus 老大出來說話了！:)


----- Forwarded message from Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk> -----

To: Ienup Sung <ienup.sung@eng.sun.com>
Cc: i18n@xfree86.org, xorg_i18n@x.org
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 12:39:37 +0000
From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: [I18n] Proposal for withdrawing Xutf8*() APIs

Proposal:

If X.Org can make a commitment to implement and release the following by
2000-05-01 in the Sample Implementation, then XFree86 shall declare the
Xutf8 functions as experimental and deprecated and shall withdraw them
from XFree86 4.0.3:

  Requirements for the next release of the Sample Implementation:

  a) Whenever X11 is compiled on a __STDC_ISO_10646__ platform, the
     X11 installation process shall guarantee that that for *ALL*
     available X11 locales, the Xwc*() functions use ISO 10646
     strings. In other words, without having to worry about the current
     locale setting, application developers will always have the ability
     to output any ISO 10646 character supported by the selected font.

  b) On all platforms there must be a well-defined standard X11 locale
     named "UTF-8" available with wc == ISO 10646 and mb = UTF-8. Other
     commonly used UTF-8 locales should be supported as well.

  c) The Xlib API documentation is updated to cover items a) and b).

  d) A comprehensive set of Unicode fonts shall be included and in particular,
     the classical standard fonts shall be extended to cover a reasonable
     Unicode repertoire. In particular:

       - the -misc-fixed-* fonts shall cover at least the Microsoft
         WGL4 repertoire
       - the Adobe and B&H fonts shall cover the ISO 8859-{1,2,3,4} +
         CP1252 repertoire.
       - there shall be at least one ISO10646-1 font covering the
         JIS X 0208 + 0212 repertoire

     (XFree86 would be prepared to contribute everything necessary
     to cover requirement c).)

  e) The ICCCM specification shall be revised to cover ISO 10646
     selections

  f) The X protocol standard shall be revised to cover the relationship
     between keysyms and ISO 10646. In particular, it shall introduce
     a convention how keysyms can be defined for UCS characters not yet
     covered by existing keysyms.

  Note: Platforms on which the macro __STDC_ISO_10646__ (see ISO/IEC
  9899:1999, ?6.10.8) is defined in the C compilation environment
  guarantee that wchar_t is encoded according to ISO 10646 in
  *ALL* locales. Glibc 2.2 is such a platform.

X.Org shall recognize that there is a significant demonstrated
application developer need to be able to output ISO 10646 characters
independent of the currently selected locale. X.Org shall recognize that
ISO 10646 is a superset of all other commonly used coded character set
standards, which is engraved in numerous formal and industry standards
for programming languages and protocols (HTML, XML, Java, ECMAScript,
C99, Ada95, TCL, Perl, Python, LDAP, X.400/X.500, to name just a few).
ISO 10646 therefore has a distinguished and paramount role among all
coded character set standards and - like ASCII - cannot be handled
adequately as just yet another replaceable encoding technique. Robust,
highly convenient, thread-safe and locale-independent access to ISO
10646 I/O API functions has to be guaranteed by the X11 API.

Any comments or commitments?

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Warm regards,
Edward Lee（李果正）
----------------
學問深時意氣平。
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