- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:43:12 +0200
On Mar 13, 2006, at 16:12, Lachlan Hunt wrote: > Henri Sivonen wrote: >> Authors are adviced not to use the UTF-32 encoding or legacy >> encodings. (Note: I think UTF-32 on the Web is harmful and utterly >> pointless, > > I agree about it being pointless, but why is it considered harmful? Opportunity cost: The time that is spent implementing something pointless could be better spend doing something else--like implementing something useful. Backwards incompatibility: Using UTF-32 instead of UTF-8 makes pages incompatible with older UAs for no good reason. Size: UTF-32 takes more bytes to transfer than UTF-8--slow load, bad user experience. >> I'd like to have some text in the spec that justifies whining >> about legacy encodings. > > What are your reasons for whining about legacy encodings and what > would you like the spec to say? Using a legacy encoding that user agents are not guaranteed to support introduces incompatibility for no good reason. (I do not consider laziness or unwillingness to use UTF-8 good reasons.) Even with well-supported legacy encodings form submission is problem. The same as incoming policy combined with an encoding that cannot encode all of Unicode leads to data loss. I would like the spec to say that if the page has forms, using an encoding other than UTF-8 is trouble. And even for pages that don't have forms, using an encoding that is not known to be extremely well supported introduces incompatibility for no good reason. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 13 March 2006 06:43:12 UTC