Re: Towards a new text terminal standard

[Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marcus:

This sounds exactly like the advice I gave to Microsoft several
months ago when they asked me how I would implement a terminal based
console for a headless Windows 2000 enterprise server.

- Jeff



> Bruno Haible wrote on 2001-01-29 19:32 UTC:
> > Which is the standards body where we could submit such a proposal?
> 
> ECMA-48 was the traditional place to handle such things, but ECMA/TC1
> (coded character sets) seems not to be active at the moment according to
> http://www.ecma.ch/.
> 
> A (quite large) project that might really be worthwhile doing is to
> author a concise video terminal standard. It should be
> 
>   - inspired by and as far as feasible (but not religiously!) backwards
>     compatible to VT100, xterm, and ECMA-48/ISO 6429
> 
>   - cut out all the exotic stuff of ISO 6429 that was never widely used
>     or widely understood and translate the rest of ISO 6429 from
>     Committeese into English
> 
>   - cut down the state of the terminal to the absolute minimum
>     (no fancy mode for every little item the old committees couldn't
>     agree on, one single character encoding: UTF-8, etc.)
> 
>   - make the document easy to read and a useful reference for the
>     programmer (ISO 6429 really fails here)
> 
>   - take into account that charcell hardware isn't used any more today
>     (except to boot an IBM PC compatible perhaps) and therefore provide
>     useful features that are easy to implement with pixel frame buffers
>     (character overstriking, etc.)
> 
>   - define exact behaviour for some well-defined Unicode subset that seems
>     feasible for implementation on charcell terminals (not sure whether
>     this will include the Indic scripts in the first version), including
>     aspects such as wcwidth()
> 
>   - keep it simple
> 
> Text terminals (today mostly in the form of software emulators) are a
> simple yet highly functional, versatile and time proven technology that
> is in my opinion here to stay and that deserves to be maintained and
> updated for a long time to come. More complicated GUI protocols such as
> X11 or the Win32 graphics API have demonstrated to be inadequate in
> providing simple and efficient user interfaces for expert users (system
> administrators, technicians, developers).
> 
> Markus
> 
> -- 
> Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
> Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
> 
> -
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> 



 Jeffrey Altman * Sr.Software Designer      C-Kermit 7.1 Alpha available
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