- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 18:17:56 -0500
- To: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Cc: Bert Bos <bert@w3.org>, Tex Texin <tex@i18nguy.com>, www-style@w3.org
> Because most stylesheets out there are in what? Most are in US-ASCII,
> I would guess, since the entire syntax of CSS uses US-ASCII. The only
> opportunities to have anything else are replaced content in:before and
> :after, which is not too common in practice since it doesn't work in
> MSIE/Win.
You forgot these niggling things little developers tend to put in code
(including stylesheets) to make it comprehensible -- comments. Lots and lots
of sheets have comments. Copyright notices, especially. With people's names.
Which tend to NOT be ascii, often enough, except in the US.
In the wild, most stylesheets that are not associated with US websites are
either ISO-8859-1 or Shift_JIS, from what I've seen. I would be hard pressed
to estimate relative frequencess of those two as compared to us-ascii.
> So, if most stylesheets are US-ASCII then a default of UTF-8 would
> work pretty well.
Yeah, as long as you stick to US sites.... since treating ISO-8859-1 or
Shift_JIS as UTF-8 will at best lead to recoverable decoding errors (and at
worst to irrecoverable ones, depending on what your decoder looks like). Note
that attempting recovery from decoding errors has security issues, so I can
perfectly well understand people not trying to do that.
Boris
--
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli on a paper submitted
by a physicist colleague
Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2004 18:18:09 UTC