Re: Using unicode or MBCS characters in forms

>Reading this stream of traffic is most disheartening;-)...

As is the current state of the WWW. As I said, I've been at this for
well over a year now, with no real improvement.
 
>The great problem to solve in this decade is that of Interworking at
>the Application Information Object Exchange level, and it is crystal
>clear that this is going to require Strong Typing, and Labeled
>Encodings on External Formats.

100% correct.
 
>That is, we must agree on what kinds of tags we will put on our bags
>of bits, in order to facilitate rendering by recipients.  Any
>acceptance of "sniffing" as a legitimate way to detect content types,
>and determine what to do to render data, is just a big fat cop out.

100% correct.
 
>Blaming it on the standards bodies for being too weak to enforce their
>will against the vendors is totally bogus.

Well, some working groups have been weak, but the vendors *are*
apathetic. We all know the benefits of content labelling, but in
general we get "most people don't do it, and if we force the
situation, it'll hurt our market share".
 
>It is time to wake up, smell the coffee, and get to work.  If the
>vendors and developers do not get with it, we only have to look
>forward to a long long spell of trouble with our attempts to work
>together.

Precisely what I have been saying for a long time now. Sadly, in order
to have a web site that handles forms in multiple languages/encodings,
you *will* have to sniff data. I hate it....
 
>This can only diminish market growth and acceptance of our WEB and
>EMail products.

Yes. I think Netscape has enough power right now to go out and deploy
browsers that do all of wht has so often been recommended. It *will*
cause some problems for some servers, but only ones that are broken
anyway. 

What I said long ago, which is becoming more important, is that we
cannot fix the WWW without some pain. Let's have a small amount, once,
instead of a headache forever.

Received on Friday, 21 June 1996 03:27:05 UTC