P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange

Non-Unicode character sets and XML processorsTEI: Non-Unicode character sets and XML processors¶

There are, however, strict limits to the way conformant XML processors handle documents whose character set is not Unicode, and unless these limits are understood it is likely that projects not yet ready to commit to Unicode across the board will run into unexpected and baffling problems as they attempt to operate with their legacy character encodings. First, it must be repeated that nothing in the XML standard requires conformant processors to handle non-Unicode documents. But even if there were any actual processors which on that basis refused to process non-Unicode documents, that would not limit their usefulness as severely as might at first appear. The reason is that there is a way of internally representing Unicode code points (explained further Encoding errors related to UTF-8 below) where there is no detectable difference between a document which is actually encoded in ASCII employing only 7-bit values and one which is encoded in Unicode but which happens to contain only the abstract characters encompassed by the 7-bit ASCII standard. And the XML standard specifies that this way of representing Unicode is the one which processors must assume as the default for any document that does not explicitly declare an encoding. At a stroke, this provision ensures that all pure 7-bit ASCII encoded documents can be processed without further ado by all conformant XML processors. Add to this the provision, also within the XML standard, that allows any Unicode code point to be indirectly specified using only 7-bit ASCII characters via a Numeric Character Reference (NCR), and the upshot is that all documents in non-Unicode encodings which can be pre-processed to rewrite any characters outside the 7-bit ASCII range as Unicode code points in NCR notation (a simple batch procedure for which software is readily available) can be handled even by processors which have no inbuilt support for any encoding other than Unicode.

In fact, every XML processor so far released has implemented methods, specified in the standard though not mandatory, which allow the processing of documents in at least some non-Unicode character sets. Such processors include in their documentation a statement of the non-Unicode encodings they support, and the use of such an encoding must be declared to the processor in the correct way.

To avoid confusion when taking advantage of such encoding support, it is first of all essential to grasp that an encoding declaration in an XML document is indeed simply a declaration: it is not an incantation that magically converts the document that follows into the encoding concerned. It is a common error to think that simply declaring a document's encoding to be, say ISO-8859-1 (or for that matter UTF-8 or UTF-16, the representations of Unicode for which support is mandatory) is sufficient to ‘make it so’. Such a declaration is useless unless the document that follows actually is encoded strictly in conformance with the declaration. Some of the circumstances in which that may not in fact be the case are outlined in Issues arising from the internal representations of Unicode below. Secondly, an encoding declaration does not somehow switch an XML processor into a mode where it works entirely in the declared encoding for as long as the declaration is in scope. On the contrary, all it does is instruct the processor to pass its input through a filter that immediately converts all the code points in the declared encoding into their Unicode counterparts; from that point onwards the document as seen by all subsequent stages of processing is actually in Unicode, even though that may not be apparent to the user. Thirdly, this invariable internal conversion has a crucial consequence: the fact that a processor can successfully accept a document in a non-Unicode encoding does not mean that it will necessarily convert any output it may produce back into the declared input encoding. Internally, the document has been converted to and processed in Unicode, and there is nothing in the XML standard that requires the reverse conversion to be performed at the output stage. Most processors go beyond the standard by offering a facility to output in various encodings: but whether it is available and how to use it must be ascertained from the processor's documentation. Should it be unavailable or unreliable, the output may need to be post-processed through a character convertor to restore the original encoding, and again such software is freely available and easy to use.

Non Unicode characters in XML documentsTEI: Non Unicode characters in XML documents¶

In the cases considered in the preceding section, there was a suitable Unicode code point corresponding to each abstract character contained in the non-Unicode character set of the input document. In such instances, the mandatory internal conversion to Unicode carried out by the processor can be more or less transparent to a user who wishes to continue to work with a non-Unicode character set. Things become rather different when the non-Unicode character set contains abstract characters for which there is no code point in the Unicode standard, or when a project that is attempting to work in Unicode throughout finds that it needs to represent abstract characters not currently provided for in the Unicode standard. Here, a significant difference between SGML and XML emerges in a rather troublesome way.

Following their agenda to devise a subset of SGML that would be significantly easier to implement, the authors of the XML specification decided that one particular type of entity available in SGML, known as an internal SDATA entity, should not be carried over into XML. It would be idle to question that decision here, but its consequences for the handling of abstract characters for which there is no Unicode definition were significant.

The procedures recommended in earlier versions of these Guidelines for encoding, processing and exchanging what we might call locally defined abstract characters were reliant on the availability of entities declared as of type SDATA, but that type is not supported in XML, and there is therefore no ready equivalent for XML-based projects to the recommendations previously offered. ³¹ Entities in XML are really only of two basic types, parsed and unparsed. Unparsed entities are of no relevance here. References to parsed entities in an XML document result in only one kind of behaviour: when they appear in the parser's input stream, the parser expects to be able to resolve them by locating a declaration in the document's internal or external subset which maps the entity name to its replacement text. The parser then inserts that replacement text into the document in place of the entity reference, which is discarded without trace. The act of replacement is not notified to the application, except where it fails because the entity is undeclared or the declaration is in some way defective (in which case the parser signals a fatal error and stops.)

Though for explanatory convenience much XML-related documentation, including these Guidelines, refers specifically to Character Entities and Character Entity References, a character entity in XML is not a distinct ‘type’ in the sense that ‘type’ is understood in Computer Science terminology, for example when referring to the type of an attribute. Hence there is no way in which editing or other software can check that the replacement to be inserted is indeed a single character or its equivalent rather than an arbitrary chunk of text, possibly including markup. A character entity is simply a general entity whose replacement text happens to be declared as a character value or a NCR representing that value. This has two important consequences if it is proposed to use such an entity reference to stand for a character that has no Unicode equivalent. First, the entity name reference will disappear at an early stage in the parse and be replaced by the declared value of the entity, so that no processing which requires access in the parsed document to the entity reference as originally entered is possible. Secondly, if a character entity is to be used as a true equivalent to a normal character, and consequently be employed at all points in a document where a single character could legitimately occur (apart from in element and attribute names, where no references of any kind are allowed) then it is essential that its replacement value indeed be pure character data. If the replacement value of the entity were to contain any markup, or a processing instruction, there would be many places in a document where simple character data would be legitimate, but where the substitution of markup or some other replacement could cause the document to become invalid or malformed. Taken together, these considerations mean that the transparent use of a CER to stand for a non-Unicode character in an XML document is simply not possible.

Compatibility charactersTEI: Compatibility characters¶

The principles of Unicode are judiciously tempered with pragmatism. This means, among other things, that the actual repertoire of characters which the standard encodes, especially those parts dating from its earlier days, include a number of items which on a strict interpretation of the Unicode Consortium's theoretical approach should not have been regarded as abstract characters in their own right. Some of these characters are grouped together into a code-point regions assigned to compatibility characters. Ligatures are a case in point. Ligatures (.e.g. the joining of adjacent lowercase letters ‘s’ and ‘t’ or ‘f’ and ‘i’ in Latin scripts, whether produced by a scribal practice of not lifting the pen between strokes or dictated by the aesthetics of a type design) are representational features with no added semantic value beyond that of the two letters they unite (though for historians of typography their presence and form in a given edition may be of scholarly significance). However, by the time the Unicode standard was first being debated, it had become common practice to include single glyphs representing the more common ligatures in the repertoires of some typesetting devices and high-end printers, and for the coded character sets built into those devices to use a single code point for such glyphs, even though they represent two distinct abstract characters. So as to increase the acceptance of Unicode among the makers and users of such devices, it was agreed that some such pseudo-characters should be incorporated into the standard. Nevertheless, if a project requires the presence of such ligatured forms to be encoded, this should normally be done via markup, not by the use of a compatibility character. That way, the presence of the ligature can still be identified (and if desired, rendered visually) where appropriate, but indexing and retrieval software will treat the code points in the document as a simple sequential occurrence of the two constituent characters concerned and so correctly align their semantics with non-ligatured equivalents. Such ligatures should not be confused with digraphs (usually) indicating diphthongs, as in the French word "cœur". Digraphs are atomic orthographic units representing abstract characters in their own right, not purely glyphic amalgamations, and indexing and retrieval software must treat them as such. Where a digraph occurs in a source text, it should normally be encoded using the appropriate code point for the single abstract character which it indeed represents, either by direct entry of the character concerned of through the appropriate CER or NCR.

Precomposed and combining characters and normalizationTEI: Precomposed and combining characters and normalization¶

The treatment of characters with diacritical marks within Unicode shows a similar combination of rigour and pragmatism. It is obvious enough that it would be feasible to represent many characters with diacritical marks in Latin and some other scripts by a sequence of code points, where one code point designated the base character and the remainder represented one or more diacritical marks that were to be combined with the base character to produce an appropriate glyphic rendering of the abstract character concerned. From its earliest phase, the Unicode Consortium espoused this view in theory but was prepared in practice to compromise by assigning single code points to precomposed characters which were already commonly assigned a single distinctive code point in existing encoding schemes. This means, however, that for quite a large number of commonly-occurring abstract characters, Unicode has two different, but logically and semantically equivalent encodings: a precomposed single code point, and a code point sequence of a base character plus one or more combining diacritics. Scripts more recently added to Unicode no longer exhibit this code-point duplication (in current practice no new precomposed characters are defined where the use of combining characters is possible) but this does nothing to remove the problem caused by the duplications permanently embodied in older strata of the character set. Together with essentially analogous issues arising from the encoding of certain East Asian ideographs, this duplication gives rise to the need to practice normalization of Unicode documents. Normalization is the process of ensuring that a given abstract character is represented in one way only in a given Unicode document or document collection. The Unicode Consortium provides four standard normalization forms, of which the Normalization Form C (NFC) seems to be most appropriate for text encoding projects. The World Wide Web Consortium has produced a document entitled Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0 ³², which among other things discusses normalization issues and outlines some relevant principles. An authoritative reference is Unicode Standard Annex #15 Unicode Normalization Forms ³³. Individual projects will have to decide how far their decisions on normalization need be influenced by the fact that at present, by no means all hardware or software can correctly render (or even consistently identify) abstract characters encoded using combining symbols. It should be noted however, that normalization as discussed in the documents above does not cover the problems mentioned above with East-Asian characters, except for issues connected with composed characters in Hangul.

It is important that every Unicode-based project should agree on, consistently implement and fully document a comprehensive and coherent normalization practice. As well as ensuring data integrity within a given project, a consistently implemented and properly documented normalization policy is essential for successful document interchange.

Character semanticsTEI: Character semantics¶

In addition to the Universal Character Set itself, the Unicode Consortium maintains a database of additional character semantics ³⁴. This includes names for each character code point and normative properties for it. Character properties, as given in this database, determine the semantics and thus the intended use of a code point or character. It also contains information that might be needed for correctly processing this character for different purposes. This database is an important reference in determining which Unicode code point to use to encode a certain character.

In addition to the printed documentation and lists made available by the Unicode consortium, the information it contains may also be accessed by a number of search systems over the Web (e.g. http://www.eki.ee/letter/). Examples of character properties included in the database include case, numeric value, directionality, and, where applicable status as a ‘compatibility character’ ³⁵. Where a project undertakes local definition of characters with code point in the PUA, it is desirable that any relevant additional information about the characters concerned should be recorded in an analogous way, as further discussed under 5 Representation of Non-standard Characters and Glyphs.

Encoding errors related to UTF-8TEI: Encoding errors related to UTF-8¶

The code points assigned by Unicode 3.0 and later are notionally 32-bit integers, and the most straightforward way to represent each such integer in computer storage would be to use 4 eight-bit bytes. However, many of the code points for characters most commonly used in Latin scripts can be represented in one byte only and the vast majority of the remainder which are in common use (including those assigned from the most frequently used PUA range) can be expressed in two bytes alone. This accounts for the use of UTF-8 and UTF-16 and their special place in the XML standard. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are ways of representing 32-bit code points in an economical way.

UTF-8 is a variable length-encoding: the more significant bits there are in the underlying code point (or in everyday terminology the bigger the number used to represent the character), the more bytes UTF-8 uses to encode it. What makes UTF-8 particularly attractive for representing Latin scripts, explaining its status as the default encoding in XML documents, is that all code points that can be expressed in seven or fewer bits (the 127 values in the original ASCII character set) are also encoded as the same seven or fewer bits (and therefore in a single byte) in UTF-8. That is why a document which is actually encoded in pure 7-bit ASCII can be fed to an XML processor without alteration and without its encoding being explicitly declared: the processor will regard it as being in the UTF-8 representation of Unicode and be able to handle it correctly on that basis.

However, even within the domain of Latin-based scripts, some projects have documents which use characters from 8 bit extensions to ASCII, e.g. those in the ISO-8859-n series of encodings, and the way characters which under ISO-8859-n use all eight bits are encoded in UTF-8 is significantly different, giving rise to puzzling errors. Abstract characters that have a single byte code point where the highest bit is set (that is, they have a decimal numeric representation between 129 and 255) are encoded in ISO-8859-n as a singlebyte with the same value as the code point. But in UTF-8 code-point values inside that range are expressed as a two byte sequence. That is to say, the abstract character in question is no longer represented in the file or in memory by the same number as its code-point value: it is transformed (hence the T in UTF) into a sequence of two different numbers. Now as a side-effect of the way such UTF-8 sequences are derived from the underlying code-point value, many of the single-byte eight-bit values employed in ISO-8859-n encodings are illegal in UTF-8.

This complicated situation has a simple consequence which can cause great bewilderment. XML processors will effortlessly handle character data in pure 7-bit ASCII without that encoding needing to be declared to the parser, and will similarly accept documents encoded in an undeclared ISO-8859-n encoding if they happen to use no characters outside the strict ASCII subset of the ISO character sets; but the parse will immediately fail if an eight-bit character from an ISO-8859-n set is encountered in the input stream, unless the document's encoding has been explicitly and correctly declared. Explicitly declaring the encoding ought to solve the problem, and if the file is correctly encoded throughout, it will do so. But since text editors and word processors are currently acquiring different degrees of Unicode support at different rates, projects are likely to find that they have to deal with some files encoded in UTF-8 along with others in, say, ISO-8859-1. Such encoding differences may go unnoticed, especially if the proportion of characters where the internal encodings are distinguishable is relatively small (for example in a long English text with a smattering of French words). If in the process of document preparation two such files have been merged, or intermixed via ‘cut and paste’ techniques, it is all too possible that the internal encodings of the resulting files will have become mixed as well. Thanks to misplaced notions of ‘user friendliness’ some current editing software silently corrects such miscodings as it displays the text, so that they remain hidden until the XML parser terminates with a fatal ‘invalid character’ error.

Where erroneously mixed encodings are the source of such an error, altering the encoding declaration will not solve the problem, though it may obfuscate it. Eight-bit character codes in a file declared as UTF-8 will always stop the parser. More insidiously, UTF-8 sequences in a file declared as ISO-8859-1 will not halt the parse, but will cause data corruption, because the parser will silently but erroneously convert each byte in every UTF-8 sequence into a spurious separate character, introducing semantic errors which may not become apparent until much later in the processing chain.

In projects that routinely handle documents in non-Latin scripts, everyone is well aware of the need to ensure correct and consistent encoding, so in such places mixed encoding problems seldom arise, and when they do are readily identified and remedied. Real confusion tends to arise, however, in projects which have a low awareness of the issues because they employ predominantly unaccented Latin characters, with only thinly-distributed instances of accented letters, or other ‘special characters’ where the internal representation under ISO-8859-n and UTF-8 are different (such as the copyright symbol, or, a frequent troublemaker where eventual HTML output is envisaged, the ‘non-breaking space’). Even, or especially, if such projects view themselves as concerned only with English documents, the close relationship between XML and Unicode means they will need to acquire an understanding of these encoding issues and develop procedures which assure consistency and integrity of encoding and its correct declaration, including the use of appropriate software for transcoding and verification.

Encoding errors related to UTF-16TEI: Encoding errors related to UTF-16¶

The advantages of UTF-8 as an internal representation of Unicode code points outlined above do not obtain where documents are in scripts other than Latin, Cyrillic or Hebrew. Where characters with code points in the sixteen-bit range (two-byte) predominate, UTF-8 is inappropriate, because it requires three or more bytes to represent each abstract character. Here the preferred representation of Unicode (which all XML-conformant parsers must support) is UTF-16, where each code point corresponding to an abstract character is represented in two eight-bit bytes ³⁶. This encoding presents a different hazard, especially while support for Unicode in editing software is relatively uneven and immature. Because the code points are represented as sixteen-bit integers stored (in most popular computers) in two separate bytes, the order in which those bytes are stored becomes important. This is dependent on the underlying hardware. In the realm of desktop computing, Macintosh machines, for example, store (on disk as well as in memory) byte pairs representing 16-bit integers with the higher-value byte first, whereas PCs using Intel processors store the bytes in the reverse order (this is often referred to with Swiftian nomenclature as big-endian versus little-endian byte order). This means that if a semantically identical plain text file encoded in UTF-16 is prepared on a Macintosh and on a PC, and the two files are then saved to disk, each byte pair in one file will be in the reverse order from the corresponding byte pair in the other file. To avoid the obvious incompatibility problems, the XML standard requires that all documents whose declared encoding is UTF-16 must begin with a special pseudo-character which is not itself part of the document, but merely a Byte Order Marker (BOM) from which the processor can determine the byte order of the document that follows. Now the insertion of a correct BOM and the consistent maintenance of the byte order throughout the file ought to be taken care of transparently by software, but experience, especially from environments where work is distributed across big-endian and little-endian hardware, shows that this cannot always be taken for granted in the current state of software development. As with mixed encoding problems involving UTF-8, inconsistent byte-order in UTF-16 files seems to be the result of merging or cutting and pasting between files using software which does not correctly enforce byte order integrity, and out of misconceived ‘user friendliness’ which conceals byte-order inconsistencies from the user. Once more, the result can be files which look correct in an editor, but which the XML parser either rejects outright or silently passes on in a seriously garbled form. Again, to avoid the consequent errors, projects need to cultivate an informed awareness of relevant encoding issues and devise policies to avoid them in the first place or detect them at an early stage.