Re: Make C1 range non-errors with ISO-8859-1 declared

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> >
> > 05:37 < Hixie> hsivonen: and you can just display something next to your
> > line
> >                reporting your encoding, e.g. "Encoding: Windows-1252 (but
> >                incorrectly labelled as ISO-8859-1)" and "Valid HTML5 except
> > for
> >                _encoding errors_" where the "encoding errors" link shows
> > some
> >                more details
>
> I know I previously suggested making 0x80-0x9F bytes be errors when 
> ISO-8859-1 is declared. I think my previous suggestion was a mistake. 
> Since then, my views of what HTML5 conformance checking should be like 
> have become even more user-oriented and less Charmod-oriented.

I think it's worth showing at least an indication that something is less 
than perfect, because tools that don't know about HTML5 and that aren't 
obsessively backwards compatible like browsers will likely not know about 
these aliases.

You can just display something next to your line reporting your encoding, 
e.g. "Encoding: Windows-1252 (but incorrectly labelled as ISO-8859-1)" and 
"Valid HTML5 except for _encoding errors_" where the "encoding errors" 
link shows some more details. It doesn't have to be heavy UI.

If IANA was to have the encoding label definitions changed so that 
ISO-8859-1 meant Windows-1252 (e.g.) then that would be different.


> As for putting encoding errors behind a link, if some errors are so 
> useless that they can be hidden behind a link, why have them as errors 
> at all? Besides, it would be silly to have to develop more complex UI 
> and more complex decoder mechanics for errors that will be hidden from 
> view.

So don't have the link part, just have the bit saying that it's 
incorrectly labeled, and punt the fancy UI for later.


> Although it would be tempting to give an error about ISO-8859-1 not 
> being the preferred IANA name for Windows-1252, I think the right way is 
> to emit a warning saying that ISO-8859-1 is treated as Windows-1252. 
> (Same for the Thai and Simplified Chinese encodings as appropriate.)

Right. I still think it should result in _some_ feedback of some kind. How 
big a fuss you make of it is your problem, the spec doesn't require a 
paragraph per byte or anything.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 22 May 2008 11:54:27 UTC