Re: lynx-dev cleanup chartrans [patch]

[Klaus Weide]

On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Leonid Pauzner wrote:

> An attempt made to remove old-style charset declaration
> in favour of chartrans-style. Few comments corrected.
> Futher cleanups appreciated.
>[snip] 
> * Chartrans: old-style declarations of charsets which do not have Unicode
>   tables (CJK, x-transparent, also UTF-8) now moved from LYCharSets.c to
>   UCdomap.h and now included with UCInit() in UCdomap.c in a standard way.

I am a bit skeptical about this patch.  Maybe it's just me not being able
to throw anything away.  So I leave the decision to someone else.  But
consider the comments below.

> @@ -329,20 +332,6 @@
>  PUBLIC CONST char ** LYCharSets[MAXCHARSETS]={
>         ISO_Latin1,             /* ISO Latin 1          */
>         SevenBitApproximations, /* ISO 8859-15 (Latin 9)*/

What's special about 8859-15, to be the only one left intact here
besides 8859-1?  "7 Bit Approximations" would much rather deserve that
honor.

> -       SevenBitApproximations, /* DosLatin1 (cp850)    */
> -       SevenBitApproximations, /* WinLatin1 (cp1252)   */
[ ... ]
> @@ -394,41 +369,6 @@
>     *  Placeholders for Unicode tables. - FM
>     */
>    {-1,"iso-8859-15",   UCT_ENC_8BIT,0,0,0,     UCT_R_8BIT,UCT_R_ASCII},
> -  {-1,"cp850",         UCT_ENC_8BIT,0,
> -                       UCT_REP_SUPERSETOF_LAT1,
> -                       0,                      UCT_R_8BIT,UCT_R_ASCII},
> -  {-1,"windows-1252",  UCT_ENC_8BIT,0,
> -                       UCT_REP_SUPERSETOF_LAT1,
> -                       0,                      UCT_R_8BIT,UCT_R_ASCII},
> -  {-1,"cp437",         UCT_ENC_8BIT,0,0,0,     UCT_R_8BIT,UCT_R_ASCII},
[ etc - including CJK, 7-bit approx., transparent ]

The various tables here served to provide some minimal information
(without taking much space) about several charsets / Display character
sets even in the case where chartrans table files for them were not
included.  Yes it's redundant; however, sometimes redundancy *may* be
good.

Historically, that information was first listed here because
EXP_CHARTRANS was optional; later, because for quite some time not all
of the Display character sets traditionally handled by Lynx had
associated .tbl files (not just the CJK ones).  I always kept thinking
that whoever installs Lynx should be able to exclude most (or all) of
the chartrans files, and still have some minimal fallback behavior in
that case, at least as good as say Lynx 2.6.  I am not sure this is
still the case; maybe it's not wanted.  It probably hasn't been tested
by anyone in a long time.  An example would be the case where someone
wanted to not have the large 7-bit approximations file, but still have
7-bit approximations available as Display character set to at least
deal with the "classical" ISO-8859-1 chars and entities.

Well, since even Henry seems to not have tried that, it may be
irrelevant.  It could become relevant if one day configure allowed
to specify the to-be-included chartrans .tbl files.

   Klaus