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- From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@allette.com.au>
- To: <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 03:46:26 +1000
From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
>I was meaning autodetection in the sense of reading a whole bunch of
the
>text and making assorted guesses based on frequency analysis and the
>like. In other words, automatic detection based on unlabelled content.
I
>believe that this is a bad thing, because there is always the
>possibility (quite high) of hgetting it wrong.
>
>The encoding declaration, on the other hand, is not autodetection in
>that sense, it is a label. A very small amount of autodetection has to
>be done in order to be sure that the label has been read, that is all
>(ie, is this UTF-16 or is this an encoding where ASCII is represented
as
>ASCII).
In academic material, this is called "codeset announcement" (e.g. in the
HANZIX
OS from the mid 90s). The term "autodection" does give people the idea
that
guessing is involved. This is important, because if developers think
that autodetection
means guessing rather than codeset announcement, they may be tempted to
guess encodings
without alerting users that something seems strange: this would not be
satisfactory for
important documents.
Rick Jelliffe
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