Hi David! On Wed 02 Feb 2005 00:29, D. Starner wrote: > I don't really care, personally. But given that even the maintainer > of the package doesn't know what it means, I don't believe it's a > useful phrase to have in the package description. Furthermore, I think > that fact that I would have to go to a mailing list to find what > character sets it supports is a documentation bug; that is something > that should be well documented. Ok, I asked on the S-XML-devel mailing-list for an explanation [1] and I modified the Debian cl-s-xml package (BTW, there's a new upstream version). I removed the character sets limitation in the package description and I added a README.Debian: ===== README for the Debian cl-s-xml package -------------------------------------- * Supported character sets While S-XML authors do not make any efforts to support anything but the basic Common Lisp character type (and string or stream type), any character set which is implemented by the underlying Common Lisp should be supported by S-XML as well. -- Luca Capello <luca@pca.it>, Thu, 3 Feb 2005 22:36:33 +0100 ===== What do you think? BTW, I searched on the net for a standard /definition/ for simple/complex character sets and the only I found was in the MIME specifications [2]: ===== 2.2. Character Set The term "character set" is used in MIME to refer to a method of converting a sequence of octets into a sequence of characters. Note that unconditional and unambiguous conversion in the other direction is not required, in that not all characters may be representable by a given character set and a character set may provide more than one sequence of octets to represent a particular sequence of characters. This definition is intended to allow various kinds of character encodings, from simple single-table mappings such as US-ASCII to complex table switching methods such as those that use ISO 2022's techniques, to be used as character sets. However, the definition associated with a MIME character set name must fully specify the mapping to be performed. In particular, use of external profiling information to determine the exact mapping is not permitted. NOTE: The term "character set" was originally to describe such straightforward schemes as US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1 which have a simple one-to-one mapping from single octets to single characters. Multi-octet coded character sets and switching techniques make the situation more complex. For example, some communities use the term "character encoding" for what MIME calls a "character set", while using the phrase "coded character set" to denote an abstract mapping from integers (not octets) to characters. ===== Thx, bye, Gismo / Luca [1] http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/s-xml-devel/2005-February/000007.html [2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2045.txt
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