RE: Problem in publishing multilingual HTML document on web in UTF-8 encoding

What has been in IE has been there for years...when the computing world
was based on code pages and system locales instead of Unicode. Actually,
that has only been some 5-7 years ago. 

Based on users needing to view pages and an ability to control the
quality of pages that a page author may generate, the best solution for
customers is help them view the page...even if the author or tool did
not put in the character set used.

I believe our task as members of the W3C should be to help educate web
content authors to make tools that correctly add markup for the encoding
used (hopefully defaulting to UTF-8) and then to educate authors who are
generating content to check that their pages are written correctly.

The past is behind us. How can we take steps to make the future better.

Paul


-----Original Message-----
From: www-html-request@w3.org [mailto:www-html-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of L. David Baron
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 11:02 PM
To: www-html@w3.org
Subject: Re: Problem in publishing multilingual HTML document on web in
UTF-8 encoding

On Monday 2006-06-05 02:45 -0700, Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote:
> What is your suggestion to enforce page authors write the correct 
> charset (if any) on their pages?

It is probably too late to switch to such an approach now for text/html,
but it would have been better to use a simple and public algorithm (such
as defaulting to UTF-8) than a complex and proprietary one.  Web authors
would then see when they did something wrong (failed to label their page
or failed to use UTF-8) when testing their pages.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
           Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, Mozilla Corporation

Received on Monday, 5 June 2006 21:21:13 UTC