Re: non-ASCII characters in /etc/locales.alias ?
At Thu, 17 Jan 2002 01:10:24 -0500,
Glenn Maynard wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 02:58:36PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> > Are you saying about tags like emacs tag? Even with tags, only one
> > encoding can be used for a file. If ISO-8859-1 is used for
> > /etc/locale.alias, it means that we cannot use non-ISO-8859-1 characters.
>
> I think he means using /etc/locale.alias as a list of locales to
> display in interfaces, as they're a little more human-readable for
> average users. I can see doing that, but there are better ways.
I see. However, it is technically impossible to realize your idea
using ISO-8859-1. UTF-8 is the only way to enable your idea
technically. Usage of ISO-8859-1 is an illegal way.
Why illegal? The reason is: I understand your aim. Human-readability
is a good idea. However, if we admit French people a good human-
readability, we have no reason not to admit the same human-readability
to other peoples, for example, Japanese or Russian. I think you agree
with this point. However, if ISO-8859-1 is used for /etc/locale.alias,
there are no ways to write Japanese/Russian in the file, because it is
illegal to mix multiple encodings in one file.
If you dare want to mix many encodings in one file, please research
ISO-2022. It enables usage of multiple coded character sets (not
encodings) in one file. However, I imagine it is a bit different
from what you want.
> > > That question stood on its own, actually. (Though, I'd prefer to make
> > > my webserver automatically recode documents based on the user-agent than
> > > have non-UTF-8 HTML locally.)
> >
> > I am not talking about webserver nor user-agent. If you want to talk
> > about them, what do you want to insist?
>
> Again, the question was just a side comment: it would be a neat thing
> for Vim to do. (But not something worth spending any amount of time coding;
> at least, not for me.)
I am talking about a file with mixture of encodings, found in .wml
files. Not HTML. It is illegal and cannot be handled by any legal
editor. If an editor can handle such an illegal file, the editor is
buggy.
Your idea of tagging like MIME or emacs is a good idea. However,
such tagging can be used to specify the encoding for the entire
contents of the file.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
Reply to: