 |
 |
-----Original Message----- From: Richard Rinehart [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: 26 October 2000 20:51 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: EAD and character entities - which option to use? Hello all, I have a question to pose to this group. At Berkeley, members of encoding teams at the Library and Art Museum have been chatting recently about how to best encode extended ASCII characters in EAD finding aids. It appears there are two main options, and I'd be very interested to hear opinions from you all, or projects in which you are tackling this problem. The options appear to be: 1) Numerical character entities (i.e. ÿ converts to a y with umlaut). The advantage of this is that it is pretty safe with many old and existing systems (such as search and delivery systems) and is legible for editing the EAD in the widest variety of old and existing software packages (word processors, etc). So, this would seem the safest option if you need your EAD finding aids to be truly portable - between different editing packages and different web portal systems. 2) Unicode. Smarter search engine/delivery systems can convert the Unicode character to the closest HTML character on the fly when delivering to the web. A disadvantage may be that it is less portable between applications which can properly display the character, but an advantage may be that it helps searching because when you search on y with umlaut it finds them because it stores them as y with umlaut in the system, whereas if you use numerical entities, the search system may store them that way, as plain text strings, so when you search on y with umlaut you don't find it because it is stored literally as ÿ (I know of at least one older SGML web delivery system that had this failing). Any other thoughts on either of these as preferrable options given of course that we want to be as portable/compatible with existing editing/delivery systems and portable/compatible with future systems? Any ideas are welcome; thanks! -- Richard Rinehart ---------------- Digital Media Director Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive @ University of California www.bampfa.berkeley.edu ---------------- & Board of Directors Museum Computer Network www.mcn.edu ________________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses, by Star Internet, delivered through the MessageLabs Virus Control Centre. For further information visit: http://www.star.net.uk/stats.asp ________________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses, by Star Internet, delivered through the MessageLabs Virus Control Centre. For further information visit: http://www.star.net.uk/stats.asp