Re: [Openexr-devel] UTF-8

[Jim Atkinson]

On Nov 15, 2012, at 4:12 PM, Florian Kainz <address@hidden> wrote:

> Jim, what would be the downside of normalizing attribute and channel names?
> Would it prevent you from doing something that you can do now?
> 
> I don't buy the slippery slope argument.  If we say that attribute names and
> channel names must be normalized, but other strings don't have to be, where's
> the problem?

I agree, "foo" is a contrived example.  Also, I guess I misunderstood you since 
I thought you were suggesting that we normalize *all* strings in the header.  
I'm much happier with the suggestion that we normalize all attribute and 
channel names but no attribute values.

My main complaint is that it adds a lot of extra complexity, dependencies, and 
portability issues to an image format library.  The main reason for adding it 
seems to be that there may be an application that may display a layer name that 
a user may have difficulty typing in.

As a monolingual English speaker, I simply don't run into these issues often.  
When confronted with a layer named "공룡" or even "grün", I'm forced to cut and 
paste it or select it in a GUI.  So maybe I don't understand how really 
pervasive and frustrating these issues are.  But it sure seems like unicode 
normalization issues should be outside the scope of OpenEXR.

- Jim