Marcos,

I don't see a conflict with my proposal. The benefit is it eliminates 
perpetuating the encoding ambiguity and interoperability problems that plague 
many of our specs and apps.

Restricting filenames to utf-8 would mean if you don't have the latest zipping 
tools, you need to stick with ascii names, which is not such a big burden (and 
kinder than adding in cp437 support!).

Regarding the design principle, it seems to give too much weight to operating 
system vendors and therefore somewhat inappropriate for the W3C. Search for 
downloadable freeware compression utilities, and there are many that support 
zip format.
Perhaps the principle should reflect more what is commonly available for no 
cost, rather than begin tied to OS support.

I seearched for "zip files download unicode filenames" and see many that 
support unicode filenames.
(I didn't check to see how many were free or how broad the OS coverage was.)

tex

-----Original Message-----
From: Marcos Caceres [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 

> If we were talking about ancient zip files, then we might have to tolerate 
> such names. But as we are discussing new specs, instead of supporting all 
> possible zip files, why not specify the use of zip files, with the constraint 
> that filenames be stored as utf-8, and make the non-utf-8 names unacceptable. 
> Perhaps with modern tools, this isn't a problem.

One of our design principles [1] for the Widget spec is that authors should be 
able to create widgets just using the zipping tools that have been pre-packaged 
with an OS. Because the introduction of allowing UTF-8 names in Zip is a very 
recent addition to that spec, we might not see implementations for a long time.


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