Re: validator.w3.org and utf-8 (fwd)

Here are some good tips from Alan Flavell...

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny              <gerald@w3.org>  +1 617 253 2920
System Administrator, W3C     http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
World Wide Web Consortium, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
545 Technology Square,  Room NE43-353  Cambridge MA  02139 USA

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@mail.cern.ch>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 13:42:01 +0200 (METDST)
To: Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@w3.org>
Cc: Andreas Prilop <nhtcwenz@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>
Subject: Re: validator.w3.org and utf-8

On Wed, 5 Aug 1998, Gerald Oskoboiny wrote:

[...]

> I'm definitely interested in fixing this bug, but I'm afraid I
> don't know a lot about i18n issues myself, so I need advice from
> others.

Well, I think the place that advice is needed would be on the actual
mechanics of informing the SP software of what charset it should be
working in, and then devising a way to pick that off the HTTP
transaction and feed it to the validator.  I have the impression that at
the moment it isn't doing anything at all of that nature, meaning it
processes every charset as if it were iso-8859-1.  But that's only my
hunch from the outside; I have looked superficially at SP, but I haven't
looked at all at the setup that your online validator is using. 

http://www.jclark.com/sp/charset.htm  is somewhat baffling to the
non-SGML-guru like myself.  I _think_ he is saying that one needs to
turn on SP_CHARSET_FIXED and use the default SP_SYSTEM_CHARSET
which is Unicode; then specify the encoding of the incoming document via
SP_ENCODING.  But I could very well have got that wrong, and I don't
understand the BCTF issue at all.

And presumably then there is the question of distinguishing between the
encoding of the SGML declarations and DTDs, on the one hand, and the
encoding of the HTML document to be validated, on the other. 

> I have (just now) sent you an invitation to join the
> www-validator mailing list, where I'd like to discuss this
> further.

I'm interested, but I'm sure there are others who are much more
technically competent to address this problem.  I'm only dabbling. 

> Would you mind if I forwarded your mail to that list, so it's
> publicly archived and I can show it to others etc.?

I can't speak for A.P of course, but for myself there's nothing I have
said on this topic that I'd need to keep private.

all the best

Received on Thursday, 6 August 1998 15:38:15 UTC