Re: Choice of coding format for Senior Online

At 10.33 +0200 99-04-05, Martin J. Duerst wrote:
> This is more or less what HTTP has done. It prooved to be detrimental,
> because ISO Latin 1 was used as a default (without explicit "charset"
> paramenter) and in various parts of the world, there was a rather low
> incentive to actually implement handling the "charset" parameter, or
> adding one where it was needed. As a result, most HTTP trafic, whether
> in ISO Latin 1 or not, is not correctly tagged.

I think his arguments are rather valid.

If we start using Unicode/ISO 10646 from the beginning, how much more
difficulty will this cause in our development work (we have limited
resources, being a publicly financed research project, not a
commercial software development venture)?

I can see two ways of doing this.

Method 1: Use ISO Latin 1 internally, and just translate to UTF-8
before we send things using our new protocol, and translate back
to ISO Latin 1 again the first thing when we get things back.

This method would not cause much difficulty, just add two translation
routines and some reduced CPU efficiency. However, this method
is a kind of "fake" UTF-8, if someone tryes to send real UTF-8,
containing other characters than those in ISO Latin 1 (such
as for example Hungarian) then our software will not perform correctly.

Method 2: Really use UTF-8 all the way interally, and send UTF-8
to the web browsers which people use as clients to Senior Online.
This method will only work if all users have web browsers which
support UTF-8.

Another disadvantage with method 2 is that we will have to
translate to ISO Latin 1 or some other simpler character set,
when we send things via e-mail, since most e-mailers in the
world do not support UTF-8 yet.

--- ---

If we do not use method 1 or 2, and if we start using only
"ISO Latin 1", we should at least employ a charset parameter
which is mandatory, and which does not default to ISO Latin 1.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme

Received on Monday, 5 April 1999 06:51:07 UTC