[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>        )=-
-=( Tel: +44 (0)161 477 1898   FAX: +44 (0)161 718 3587         )=-




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