Re: utf8u tag proposal

Its been a couple weeks now and no one has responded to this proposal...

I'd like to voice my support for it. I'd like to see this become a standard
data type.

The basic definition (URI, Kind, Definition) all seem to be what we agreed
on.

I'm not sure that as verbose a rationale is required (and I feel some of it
asserts opinion as fact). Most of what needs to be said in the rationale is
said in the first paragraph. Explaining why the % sign is not always escaped
is a bit misleading, however. Specifically, the problem I see is that in
systems where "%%" is used to represent "%", the application would still
need to be alert to cases where it was then followed by a pair of hex digits
(as noted in the encoding notes), so saying that it provides compatibility
with those systems is not true in all cases.

The encoding/decoding notes will be useful. For encoding point 2 ("Any
sequence of bytes that is a valid UTF-8 encoding is written as the Unicode
character (the UTF-8 encodings of U+D800..U+DFFF are *not* valid and must
remain written as three %xx sequences)"), I think that this should say "any
sequence of bytes that is the valid UTF-8 encoding of a printable
character", which, per the YAML specification, excludes U+D800..U+DFFF as
well as other invalid characters and those that don't have an easily
discernable representation (those that can't be directly placed into a YAML
file anyways).

For the UTF-32 section, if we intend for it to be able to represent invalid
UTF-32 (and I personally think this is of questionable value), then we
should say that the UTF-8 representation is using the original specification
for UTF-8 and not the more recent Unicode version (with its extra validation
rules) somewhere in the definition. To my mind, this creates more problems
than it solves since many languages already have encoders/decoders that work
with the Unicode version of UTF-8, but might not work with the original
version.

Thanks,

BlueG


 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Spitzak [mailto:[email protected]] 
> Sent: Monday, September 07, 2009 10:33 PM
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: [Yaml-core] utf8u tag proposal
> 
> Okay I tried to type up a formal proposal for the !!utf8u 
> tag. I based this on a !!binary proposal I found.
> 
> Sorry about the plain text but I figured this would make it 
> easier for somebody to put it in a wiki.
> 
> Comments/changes please!
> 
> 


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