ietf-822
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Re: BOF: Format-Flowed and Non-Western Charsets

2002-03-25 12:13:50


On Tuesday, Mar 19, 2002, at 08:03 US/Pacific, Randall Gellens wrote:

I'm no expert on this, but many languages need to be broken up for display in the same way as languages that use lots of spaces. Clients that deal with these languages already need rules to decide how to do this.

There is no suggestion to add language tags. There are really only two proposals: (A) keep f=f as it is now, and add text to the spec which says it is OK to delete the space as well as the CRLF under some conditions; and (B) obsolete f=f and introduce f=x where the space is always deleted.

From my point of view, either proposal would work, although I have a preference for (B) because it's more explicit as to what you should do on the receiving end.

I'm somewhat concerned that the determination of "under some conditions" (a.k.a. having language-specific rules) may be tricky. It seems to boil down to being able to answer the question "Does a space at the given position in the text convey any meaning?", which is different from the question of line breaking.

Anyway, I don't know enough about non-Euro text to know if that can be answered reliably. I'm told that you can usually tell in CJK, based on the characters on either side of the space.

--Grant

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Grant Baillie - gbaillie(_at_)apple(_dot_)com
Mac OS X Mail - Apple Computer, Inc.
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