A proposed solution for descriptions (was: Re: ISO 639 - New item approved - N'Ko)

[John Cowan]

Mark Crispin scripsit:

> No &#x sequences should ever appear in an ASCII-only form; nor, for that 
> matter, should ISO 8859-1 codepoints.  

Unfortunately, Ltru was trapped between a rock and a hard place.  It had
source materials using at least a Windows-1252 character repertoire that
had to be reduced to publication in the form of an Internet-Draft, where
only ASCII is acceptable.  Some transformation of the source material
was unavoidable.

The choice taken was to introduce SGML escape sequences into the plain
text of the I-D (and the consequent IANA publication), documented as such.
Now we are considering adding escape-free alternatives, since it is
obvious that escape sequences (as opposed to the Unicode characters they
represent) will not be found by anything but a completely specialized
search engine.

(In particular, Google cannot cope; a search for "natisone dialect nadiza
dialect Provençal" succeeds, but using "Provencal" or "Provençal"
instead fails.)

Doubly unfortunately, this undertaking has opened a free-for-all wherein
all real or imaginary errors (and I take no position on which is which)
of the source material must be corrected on the spot.  We shouldn't be
here and should leave this place at once.

-- 
At the end of the Metatarsal Age, the dinosaurs     John Cowan
abruptly vanished. The theory that a single         cowan at ccil.org
catastrophic event may have been responsible        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
has been strengthened by the recent discovery of
a worldwide layer of whipped cream marking the
Creosote-Tutelary boundary.             --Science Made Stupid