[tz] TZ file comments UTF-8? Bastardized HTML? (was Re: Busingen revisited)

[Ian Abbott]

On 2013-01-12 21:04, Steffen Daode Nurpmeso wrote:
> Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>
>   |The HTML markup has bothered me, too; I have found it more
>   |distracting than useful.  URLs themselves should be fine,
>   |but the <a href='...'> business gets in the way.
>
> How about turning over to a simple generic approach, as in
>
>    L<http://www.url1.com>
>    and/or
>    L<Some descriptive text><http://www.url2.com>
>
> and having "I" for informational links that follow the same style
> but do not provide hyperlinks and "D" for dead links?

Do we really have a use for post-processing the comments into another 
document format?  I think it's fine just to keep the comments in the 
files readable by humans (which is where the HTML stuff currently gets 
in the way).

Some consistency would be nice though.  Some URLs are just written 
as-is, some are enclosed in angle brackets, and most currently get the 
HTML href treatment.  I think we only really need to distinguish between 
named links and unnamed links, and if the comments are only intended to 
be processed by humans, there is no need to mark-up the "name" part of 
the link specially.

For human-only rendering of links, perhaps stick with plain links 
enclosed in angle brackets, and for named links just enclose the 
reference in angle brackets and parentheses after the link name.

For example, replace:

# Since 1998 Joseph S. Myers has been updating
# and extending this list, which can be found in
# http://student.cusu.cam.ac.uk/~jsm28/british-time/
# <a href="http://www.polyomino.org.uk/british-time/">
# History of legal time in Britain
# </a>
# Rob Crowther (2012-01-04) reports that that URL no longer
# exists, and the article can now be found at:
# <a href="http://www.polyomino.org.uk/british-time/">
# http://www.polyomino.org.uk/british-time/
# </a>

with:

# Since 1998 Joseph S. Myers has been updating
# and extending this list, which can be found in
# History of legal time in Britain
# (<http://student.cusu.cam.ac.uk/~jsm28/british-time/>).
# Rob Crowther (2012-01-04) reports that that URL no longer
# exists, and the article can now be found at:
# <http://www.polyomino.org.uk/british-time/>.

or something like that.

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti at mev.co.uk>        )=-
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