[tz] TZ file comments UTF-8? Bastardized HTML? (was Re: Busingen revisited)
Ian Abbott
abbotti at mev.co.uk
Thu Jan 10 13:04:04 UTC 2013
On 2013-01-10 11:33, Steffen Daode Nurpmeso wrote:
> Ian Abbott <abbotti at mev.co.uk> wrote:
> |On 09/01/2013 18:22, Steffen Daode Nurpmeso wrote:
> |> Not that i really care, since these names are not ment for end
> |> users, as has been clarified multiple times in the last months…
> |> Maybe you are just ahead of our time.
> |> I'm against any mutilation of the German language, on principle.
> |
> |You should see how the English spell Köln! Fortunately, it's not in the
> |tz database. ;)
>
> They use the old roman name?. Ach, i'm sick that only words like
> »Kindergarten« and »Blitzkrieg« go the other direction ;
The English use the French name, as in "eau de Cologne", but derived
from the first part of the Roman name, "Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium".
> But this is all blabla.
Yes, the thread topic has drifted a bit. I changed the subject.
> Except that maybe tz should be converted to UTF-8 so that at least
> the comments won't mutilate names of reporters etc. in the future,
> and could thus mention the real name »Büsingen« just as is, with the
> zone name being whatever fits best in ASCII filename.
> Using HTML entities does not seem to be a good solution to me.
I'd prefer the comments to be in UTF-8 without the HTML entities and
HTML tags, but the non-comment parts of the files to be restricted to
plain-old ASCII. The current HTML mark-up tags seem to have been added
around December 1997 or earlier, although there have been URLs in the
files since 1996 or earlier. The TZ files pre-date HTML by several
years and pre-date UTF-8 by several more years.
I'm not sure how widespread the adoption of UTF-8 text files is in the
big, wide world, but I don't suppose we should care as long as the zic
compilers don't break and the systems that zic is run on support 8-bit
text files.
--
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd. E-mail: <abbotti at mev.co.uk> )=-
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