Opening files in Notepad with/without UTF-8 signature

Tex, 

I have realised this evening that although I use Notepad all the time, I
almost never used the Open dialog box !  I simply right click on a file
and say Open with > Notepad, or drag and drop the file into an open
Notepad window.  I find that when either of these approaches I never
have an issue with Notepad failing to recognise that this is utf-8 and I
always see my file displayed correctly.

If I use the Open dialog box I note that it appears to auto-detect the
signature before opening a file and automatically changes the Encoding
option when it is able to detect a utf-8 file.  But if this fails, it is
not forcing me to open the file as ANSI.  If there's no auto-detection
of the utf-8 signature, it doesn't seem to me that you are in any way in
an unusual situation when compared to general editing of files.  If your
file is encoded as iso-8859-5, you'd generally need to know that and
specify that when opening the file in any editor.

So I think that with Notepad, rather than us being faced with a problem,
we are, on the contrary, simply being offered some useful help if it can
sniff and detect that this is a utf-8 file.  Otherwise, all things are
equal with what you would naturally expect.

So I'm not convinced that there is any particular issue to address here.

RI

============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 

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Received on Wednesday, 5 November 2003 16:00:55 UTC