I agree with John. The interchange standard should be UTF-8 or UTF-16. The
sending and receiving systems should handle conversions. If the receiving
system does not tag files, and uses just one encoding, it should convert
the file as best it can.
This way, the receiving system does not need to recognize a large number of
character sets, only those it wishes to support.
Since the meaning of CR, LF, CRLF, FF cannot be agreed, I agree additional
Unicode characters look like a good solution. And again, the sending and
receiving systems should handle conversions.
I don't think tabs are needed. Spaces are sufficient.
Jony
At 11:44 04/07/99 -0700, John Cowan wrote:
>Frank da Cruz scripsit:
>
>> One of the key questions in designing and implementing such a protocol is
>> "what is a text file?"
>
>Indeed. The GNU utilities go to great lengths to process all 256 bytes
>even in purely text utilities, but none of them (except specific conversion
>programs) handle multibyte text.
>
>> So at minimum, a text file should be tagged according to character set. To
>> my knowledge, this has never been done at the file-system level.
>
>Either that, or there needs to be only one character set!
>:-)
>
>--
>John Cowan cowan@ccil.org
> I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin
>
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