Subject: internationalization

From: Adam Klatzkin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 14:45:23 -0500

Can anybody offer any advice on implementing an internationalized webDAV
server that will work with existing webDAV clients.
The server I am developing encodes all data in utf-8.  Whenever I return
this multistatus response to Microsoft web folders (under Win2K) if the
utf-8 stream contains all latin (single-byte) characters it works fine.  If
there are characters in the stream that are multi-byte, web folders crashes.
e.g.
<D:displayname>My Folder</D:displayname>
^--- works fine
<D:displayName>["My Folder" in the Arabic unicode subrange]</D:displayName>
^--- web folders crashes and explorer goes down with it.

Under WinNT webfolders does not crash, but I get the following error
"The current operation cannot be completed because an unexpected error has
occurred"

Using Riverfront WebDrive I do not receive any errors but the UTF-8 data is
displayed as ASCII.

Thanks for any help,
Adam Klatzkin
Software Engineer
Bentley Systems

---

From: "Jim Whitehead" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 15:54:09 -0800

Hmm, this is worse than I had feared.  Based on your experience, it seems
the best near-term approach is to stick with single-byte latin characters.

Looking to the future, however, one of the ways you could help the community
is by hosting (or allowing me to host) a publically available DAV server
that has a directory containing multiple character sets. Ideally, you would
have a Web site with a picture of what it is supposed to look like, and then
the area where DAV clients could be directed for testing.  One of the
reasons why the current i18n support is so bad is due to the lack of a
publically available server that is responding with multi-byte characters.

Alternately, perhaps this is something that mod_dav can do, and perhaps Greg
Stein could provide a multi-byte character testing directory on webdav.org.
Greg?

- Jim

---

From: "Kevin Wiggen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 17:07:32 -0800

Actually I agree that client support for internationalization is lacking,
but server support has always been there :)

Take a look at

http://www.sharemation.com/~jane/international

Hello World in English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean
(you'll need the fonts installed to see these correctly).

As always, Xythos supports the Webdav protocol so you can also do PROPFINDs
to the server.

Kevin
Xythos

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Jim Whitehead
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2000 3:54 PM
To: Adam Klatzkin; [email-masked]
Cc: Greg Stein
Subject: RE: internationalization

- Jim

---

From: Greg Stein <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2000 04:39:50 -0800

http://test.webdav.org/dav/ is always available to anybody wishing to do DAV
testing (against mod_dav).

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

---

From: "Dennis E. Hamilton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 14:07:48 -0800

I want to respond on two topics -- the problems being encountered around
internationalization and the question I swear I saw here about registering
properties for DAV applications (but I can't find in my WebDAV/DASL folder).

The internationalization and character set problem is one of those great
demonstrators of system incoherence that leaves users helpless (the greatest
one from the recent and present past being end-to-end delivery of e-mail
with intelligible attachments).  It shows up in all efforts at
document-management interoperability.  (The ODMA middleware fails to
implement the ODMA specification concerning character set encodings, and the
specification fails to provide interoperability across code-page regimes.  I
am not picking on ODMA, it is simply one I have been struggling with most
recently.  It demonstrates how intuitively-convenient approaches can fail to
achieve the goals that are claimed for them.)

The AIIM DMware site, still under development, is intended to provide a
forum and resources for (1) exposing these difficulties; (2) identifying
experiences, practices, and tools that overcome them; and (3) providing a
place where people can perform open registration of metadata definitions and
tag sets as a way of fostering reuse and development of commonly-reusable
definitions.  This can include character sets, encodings, and also collation
rules specific to different language groups and applications.

Interoperability and interchange of metadata identifications between
different systems (e.g., the DAV and XML name-space scheme, the DMA and
other GUID-based schemes, the ODMA tag scheme, the property set scheme
shared throughout Microsoft products, and so on) is also to be supported.

This is not meant to be a grandiose all-embracing database.  The idea is to
provide a place where people can voluntarily contribute to the accumulation
of information and experience and it can be grown and extended as its
utility is established.  I don't have a particular model other than it
should be easy to use, raise the level of awareness of what there is to pay
attention to, and be conformable to more-ambitious models for
metadata-description interchange.

I am not sure where there is a good forum for continuing discussions on this
topic -- it is tangential to WebDAV, DASL, and DeltaV, although it crosses
many interests.

Because these topics have shown up here, I wanted to invite suggestions from
participants here on how we might find a mutual interest and take advantage
of AIIM DMware support in this area.

I invite further discussion and suggestions on this topic.

Please respond here or directly to me.

Thanks,

-- Dennis

AIIM DMware Technical Coordinator
AIIM DMware http://www.infonuovo.com/dmware
ODMA Support http://www.infonuovo.com/odma
------------------
Dennis E. Hamilton            tel. +1-425-793-0283
mailto:[email-masked]       fax. +1-425-430-8189

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Greg Stein
Sent: Friday, December 08, 2000 04:40
To: Jim Whitehead
Cc: Adam Klatzkin; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: internationalization

Cheers,
-g

---

From: "Stewart Hersey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 18:17:12 -0800

Dennis,

The DMware site is fascinating.

You wrote:

"The idea is to provide a place where
people can voluntarily contribute to 
the accumulation of information and 
experience and it can be grown and 
extended as its utility is established."

I have built my career over ten years while evangelizing this idea.

I'll be in attendance @ the AIIM E-Business Seminar:
"Understanding the Critical Issues in Enterprise Content Management"
Tue, Feb 6, 2001 
Clarion Hotel - San Francisco Airport
Millbrae,CA

Perhaps we could speak further about Internationalization in-person at that time.

Cheers,

Stewart Hersey
www.newma.com