- From: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:13:32 +0100
- To: "'Henri Sivonen'" <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Cc: <public-html@w3.org>, <www-international@w3.org>
> From: Henri Sivonen [mailto:hsivonen@iki.fi] > Sent: 27 July 2010 11:33 ... > > [2] i18n folks have long advised that you should always include a > > visible > > indication of the encoding in a document, HTML or XML, even if you > > don't > > strictly need to, because it can be very useful for developers, > > testers, or > > translation production managers who want to visually check the > > encoding of a > > document. > > That's a bad rationale. It's a *very* bad idea to check the encoding by > reading a string that doesn't participate in encoding detection at all, since the > string may be wrong. Well any encoding declaration may be wrong - participation in the encoding detection doesn't mean that the encoding of the document will actually be what the declaration says. So I don't think it makes much difference. On the other hand, since actually getting your document into a utf-16 encoding is a little more complicated than using other encodings, it may be more often right - in which case it is extremely useful for people who visually inspect the document, given that they can't see the BOM and may otherwise assume that the encoding is not utf-16. RI
Received on Tuesday, 27 July 2010 12:14:06 UTC