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- From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@allette.com.au>
- To: <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
- Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 19:42:38 +1000
From: John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>
>Remember that I spoke of a client that *cannot* understand EBCDIC
>(because it has no conversion table, say), but perhaps has the 4-byte
>heuristic from Appendix F.
Just a side comment: In Appendix F of the XML spec, it is not encoding
declarations which are non-normative, it is the particular (details of
the) algorithm for interpreting them.
It is non-normative, because (apart from anything else) it does not
attempt to completely cover the full range of possible IANA character
sets which could be used with XML: it demonstrates how a processor uses
the encoding declaration for some common character encodings.
In just the same way as the term "auto-detection" fails to indicate that
it is not guesswork, "heuristic" may also suggest to some to some that
the Appendix F algorithm involves guesswork. So I certainly prefer
"algorithm" to "heuristic".
No matter what kind of system for representing differing character
encodings (internal, external, defaulted, BOMed, etc) , there is the
possibility that encodings will go astray. I think this is a fault of
operating systems: without a way to reliably indicate charset and so on
for documents, webservers do not have anything to query in order to
source the information: I guess that UNIX is the worst player here--Macs
have the resource fork and the business operating systems have
registries or databases (AS400 can register text as 8-, 16, or 32 bit;
however, I don't think it has a way to specify character set beyond
that.)
Rick Jelliffe
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