Re: i18n reviews of DOM 3 Core and Load&Save

>I'd ask the working group to reconsider this one. It seems to be
>asking for non-compatibility of code. I think a minimum of one
>encoding should be required for all implementations, preferably
>UTF-8; and I really don't think it would be that onerous to require
>all three.

Since parsers are required to accept all three (UTF8 and both byte-orders
of UTF16, with appropriate byte-order mark), generating any of the three as
the default output encoding should result in a document that all parsers
will accept.

And gods know you can't run test suites using a byte-level analysis tool,
since some aspects of XML formatting are variable.

I agree that it would be preferable for everyone to support at least these
three basic encodings. But I'm not sure that needs to be mandated as
opposed to being left as a quality-of-implementation issue. I think the
marketplace will push folks to support UTF-8 whether we mandate it or not.


______________________________________
Joe Kesselman, IBM Next-Generation Web Technologies: XML, XSL and more.
"The world changed profoundly and unpredictably the day Tim Berners Lee
got bitten by a radioactive spider." -- Rafe Culpin, in r.m.filk

Received on Thursday, 18 September 2003 09:17:15 UTC