Larry Masinter wrote: > What benefits to the Internet, the Web, to anyone else, is there > in specifying what the default configuration should be for various > "demographics", independent of the actual user's language and > preference? Does it help a Kenyan who brings a laptop for use > by his Egyptian wife living in Finland? > > I assume the rationale is that there needs to be a default encoding for when legacy content does not indicate its encoding. Essentially its a crude numbers game, that assumes : 1) browsers actually support the encoding a legacy document is in. which isn't always true. the number of current blogs posts i've been seeing lately using one of the VNI encodings is a case in point. 2) it assumes that countries or regions are homogeneous, with everyone using the same language. Most of my friend's in Melbourne (Australia) may surf the net in English, but just as often use another language on the web, a few using encodings not supported by modern web browsers. Andrew -- Andrew Cunningham Senior Manager, Research and Development Vicnet State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Ph: +61-3-8664-7430 Fax: +61-3-9639-2175 Email: andrewc@vicnet.net.au Alt email: lang.support@gmail.com http://home.vicnet.net.au/~andrewc/ http://www.openroad.net.au http://www.vicnet.net.au http://www.slv.vic.gov.au
Received on Monday, 12 October 2009 02:19:46 UTC