xml-dev - Re: Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

"Don Park" <donpark@docuverse.com> writes:

> Right.  This means that SML is not a good choice for 'documents' nor
> encoding data with lots of foreign characters.

Like, say, a database with the names of subscribers to a Chinese
e-mag, or a collection of information about Arabic movies.  

Right now, it happens that a few large English-speaking former British
colonies (U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and Western Europe
make up a majority of the computer-using world, but since we make up a
small minority of the world in general, I expect that things will
change rapidly -- data from Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Japan or Korea
can have exactly the same problem as a document.

Actually, in the end I found that supporting UTF-16/UCS-2 as well as
UTF-8 wasn't that hard in AElfred (again, just a few lines of code,
and I didn't use the Java 1.1 library stuff).  The hard part about
Unicode is that there's such a wide range of characters allowed and
not allowed in each context, and XML 1.0 *requires* parsers to report
all of those errors.  That's a problem with UTF-8 as well as UTF-16.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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