- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:43:35 -0700
- To: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, "Dr. Olaf Hoffmann" <Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de>
- CC: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
I said: > What the document should say, rather than having a 'willful' > misinterpretation, is that ISO-8859-1 means ISO-8859-1, but that > for backward compatibility with existing (broken) web content, > HTTP interpreting agents SHOULD treat characters outside of the > ISO-8859-1 repertoire as if they were in Windows-1252. and Anne replied: > The document already says this. (Though it is a MUST, not SHOULD.) There is a world of difference between normative requirements and implementation advice. The character equivalence tables in section 2.7 should be scrapped, or put in a separate "legacy content compatibility guide". Broken legacy content *does* disappear, and building the Hypertext Markup Language in which the normative conformance requirements are restricted to those that will be useful even in controlled environments. The advice for the few "public browser" implementors who feel compelled to also deal with the increasing their compatibility with existing web sites from 67% to 67.2% of existing content by supporting odd, broken character transformations. What percentage of web sites mislabel EUC-KR as windows-949, for this to be a MUST requirement in HTML5? The "copy/paste" use case where broken content makes its way into new web pages and web applications does not apply. The charset equivalence tables do not apply anyway to browsers which do not support the charsets for which equivalents are supplied. If HTML5 only requires two charsets, then requiring support for equivalence tables is nonsensical. >> IMHO, the willful disregard for compatibility with other >> specifications in the current specification reflects a consistent >> error in judgment. > From the above it is unclear to me whether you > understood the specification. From the above it is unclear to me whether you understood the word judgment. Larry
Received on Friday, 31 July 2009 05:44:26 UTC