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- From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- To: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>
- Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 18:14:26 +0200
Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>
> From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
> >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 getting 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"
Yes, and it is also called a "designating sequence" in ISO-2022 but hey,
I didn't want to go there.
> The term "autodection" does give people the idea
> that guessing is involved.
Yes. That was the sense in which I was using it. I agree that this is a
bad concept to promote.
> 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:
Right, and this would be real bad.
In contrast, the XML encoding declaration is a real declaration, just
like <!ELEMENT is a real declaration, and not a licence to turn on
heuristic bodje-up mode.
--
Chris
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