- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 18:16:17 -0500
- To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org <www-tag@w3.org>
At 3:08 PM -0800 3/5/04, Tim Bray wrote: >This is controversial. I think in general this is reasonable, with >the single exception of doing what XML did and blessing both UTF-8 >and UTF-16. The problem with a single encoding is that it forces >people to choose between being Java/C# friendly (UTF-16) and C/C++ >friendly (UTF-8). Later on, you in fact seem to agree with this >point. Furthermore it's trivially easy to distinguish between UTF-8 >and UTF-16 if you specify a BOM. But I think that if I were >defining the next CSS or equivalent I'd like to be able to say >"UTF-8 or UTF-16" without feeling guilty. Speaking as a Java programmer, I do not find UTF-8 to be less Java friendly than UTF-16. Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 need to be passed through a Reader on input and a Writer on output for any sort of robustness to apply. Which one I choose to use is almost never based on Java's internal storage format for Strings. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Java I/O (O'Reilly & Associates, 1999) | | http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/books/javaio/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1565924851/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Received on Friday, 5 March 2004 18:17:08 UTC