Hexdump web service

Hi,

  It is nowadays quite common that authors have trouble with some
encoding issues, literal U+00A0 characters in web pages, multiple
Unicode signatures due to server side file inclusion mechanisms,
etc. In order to analyze, visualize and fix such issues, it is
often helpful to look at the raw bytes of a document. To ease this
for users, I would like to have a W3C web service that allows to
enter a URI and returns something like

  00000000: 3C 3F 78 6D 6C 20 76 65 | 72 73 69 6F 6E 3D 22 31 | <?xml version="1
  00000010: 2E 30 22 20 65 6E 63 6F | 64 69 6E 67 3D 22 55 54 | .0" encoding="UT
  00000020: 46 2D 38 22 3F 3E 0A 3C | 21 44 4F 43 54 59 50 45 | F-8"?>.<!DOCTYPE
  00000030: 20 68 74 6D 6C 20 50 55 | 42 4C 49 43 20 22 2D 2F |  html PUBLIC "-/
  00000040: 2F 57 33 43 2F 2F 44 54 | 44 20 58 48 54 4D 4C 20 | /W3C//DTD XHTML 
  ...

I think such a service would be of great use for the various W3C
Validation tools, in case of encoding errors they could just link
to it; and it's only a few lines of code to write one.

regards.

Received on Friday, 20 February 2004 13:36:44 UTC