[aprssig] spaces in object names

[Gregg Wonderly]

Pete Loveall AE5PL Lists wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Patrick
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2009 8:02 PM
>>
>> That said, around the same effect can be duplicated by either an
>> underscore or a period filling in the spaces as both do denote visible
>> characters...
> 
> True for display but... the spec does not limit the "printable ASCII characters" which means a name of !@#$%^&*( (9 characters) is a legal Object name according to the spec.  I doubt this was the "intent" of the APRS WG but nonetheless that means ...,,,__- is also a "legal" Object name.  This severely limits what you might want to use to substitute in the "display" of the name.  For database purposes (whether online or in an application), if it is decided as I think most agree that trailing spaces may be ignored and therefore trimmed when displayed or stored, you still don't want to alter the base content between the first and last non-space characters even if that content includes spaces between those characters.
> 
> Something to think about.  I have seen a lot of "strange" Object names over the years but, according to the spec, they have all been "legal".  The danger is to create some new alteration of the specification that will not be seen by all and cause even further confusion and ambiguity.  Modifying an Object name by removing multiple embedded spaces, IMO, is just that kind of "new alteration".

Eliminating the use of a character in software generating object names seems 
pretty benign to me.  It just means that that character will not appear in use 
for software systems that exist today and which will not undergo any further 
development.

I'm really confused about how much is being leveraged off the words in the spec 
as the complete controlling factor.  People do make mistakes and do misstate 
things and misspeak with the wrong terms.  Bob says they did not want to allow 
spaces, so that says to me there shouldn't be use of spaces in any way that 
creates problems.

I personally don't like embedded spaces because it creates confusion.

Maybe someone can illustrate a situation where a space character provides more 
information than another separator character such as the most common of '.', '_' 
and '-'?  In many word processors, typing two or more '-' will cause an extended 
length dash to be placed into the text, but it still is a single separator.

I'm still confused over the heat of the battle here...

Gregg Wonderly