Bug#647645: More precise reference to ASCII characters, and few phrasing issues

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Fri, Nov 04, 2011 at 01:12:41PM -0700, Regid Ichira a écrit :
> 
> Section 5.1 contain
> 1. non precise reference to ASCII characters
> 2. Two phrasing issues.
> 
>   Quoting http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-english/2011/11/msg00002.html

Dear Regid and everybody,

For the missing preposition, it was already fixed by commit
4d25f1055ce4bed36430690bef493db776f27302.

For the reference to ASCII characters and is phrasing, the current one uses a
similar wording as RFC 5322 §2.2, quoted below.

   Header fields are lines beginning with a field name, followed by a
   colon (":"), followed by a field body, and terminated by CRLF.  A
   field name MUST be composed of printable US-ASCII characters (i.e.,
   characters that have values between 33 and 126, inclusive), except
   colon.

I did not realise that this definition of printable characters contradicts
other definitions (and the Wikipedia).  According to RFC 20, the space
character is a graphic character that is ‘normally non-printing’, which does
not solve our problem.

I personally find ‘[!-~]’ a bit dry, and I think there is a benefit calling the
characters by their name, as it allows searches through the document.  Given
that the Policy uses only ‘hash’, but not ‘pound’, ‘numbersign’ nor
‘octothorpe’, I propose to call the # character by this name, as it is its
first occurence in Chapter 5.  So how about the following:

	  Each paragraph consists of a series of data fields; each
	  field consists of the field name, followed by a colon and
	  then the data/value associated with that field.  The field
	  name MUST be composed of US-ASCII characters excluding
	  control characters, space and colon (i.e., characters in the
	  ranges 33–57 and 59–126, inclusive).  In addition, they
	  MUST NOT begin with a hash character (<tt>#</tt>).

By the way, is ‘consists of a series of data fields’ gramatically correct ?

PS: the use of uppercase letters here is not a negative answer to Bill's
proposition of using entities.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan