Marcus: This sounds exactly like the advice I gave to Microsoft several months ago when they asked me how I would implement a terminal based console for a headless Windows 2000 enterprise server. - Jeff > Bruno Haible wrote on 2001-01-29 19:32 UTC: > > Which is the standards body where we could submit such a proposal? > > ECMA-48 was the traditional place to handle such things, but ECMA/TC1 > (coded character sets) seems not to be active at the moment according to > http://www.ecma.ch/. > > A (quite large) project that might really be worthwhile doing is to > author a concise video terminal standard. It should be > > - inspired by and as far as feasible (but not religiously!) backwards > compatible to VT100, xterm, and ECMA-48/ISO 6429 > > - cut out all the exotic stuff of ISO 6429 that was never widely used > or widely understood and translate the rest of ISO 6429 from > Committeese into English > > - cut down the state of the terminal to the absolute minimum > (no fancy mode for every little item the old committees couldn't > agree on, one single character encoding: UTF-8, etc.) > > - make the document easy to read and a useful reference for the > programmer (ISO 6429 really fails here) > > - take into account that charcell hardware isn't used any more today > (except to boot an IBM PC compatible perhaps) and therefore provide > useful features that are easy to implement with pixel frame buffers > (character overstriking, etc.) > > - define exact behaviour for some well-defined Unicode subset that seems > feasible for implementation on charcell terminals (not sure whether > this will include the Indic scripts in the first version), including > aspects such as wcwidth() > > - keep it simple > > Text terminals (today mostly in the form of software emulators) are a > simple yet highly functional, versatile and time proven technology that > is in my opinion here to stay and that deserves to be maintained and > updated for a long time to come. More complicated GUI protocols such as > X11 or the Win32 graphics API have demonstrated to be inadequate in > providing simple and efficient user interfaces for expert users (system > administrators, technicians, developers). > > Markus > > -- > Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK > Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> > > - > Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels > Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/ > Jeffrey Altman * Sr.Software Designer C-Kermit 7.1 Alpha available The Kermit Project @ Columbia University includes Secure Telnet and FTP http://www.kermit-project.org/ using Kerberos, SRP, and [EMAIL PROTECTED] OpenSSL. SSH soon to follow. - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
