xml-dev - Re: Possible changes for XML 2nd Edition

["David Brownell" <david-b@pacbell.net>]

Last time I had any occasion to look at this, the bogus
behaviors in Java were restricted to output processing,
not input processing.  (Most output encoders provide a
non-configurable substitution, writing '?' when they
should instead throw an exception, or maybe even use
the Unicode character designated for that role.)  I seem
to recall that JDK 1.3 has at least partially fixed this.

In any case, (a) standards like the XML spec should never
be designed around vendor bugs, and (b) essentially every
Java parser of XML I've seen has its own UTF-8 decoder,
for speed (*), so platform bugs in that area are easily
worked around.  (Which might reduce the likelihood of
them getting fixed, sadly enough, since Java isn't at
this time an Open Source platform where such violations
are readily fixed by anyone with the urge.)

- Dave

(*) Sun's not the vendor to blame for those speed issues;
    it's easy to implement a java.io.Reader class that
    does the decodings with  very low overhead, but the folk
    who did that subsysteim in JDK 1.1 didn't choose such
    a natural approach.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>
To: <xml-dev@xml.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 12:12 AM
Subject: Re: Possible changes for XML 2nd Edition


> Steve Schafer wrote:
>  
> > Do there really exist library functions that purportedly read UTF-8
> > yet accept FF on input? If so, what do they convert it to?
> 
> I think it has been the default behaviour of Java to swallow encoding
> flaws without an error.  I think Netscape also did the same. I have used
> applications which simply replace bogus characters with ASCII ? as well.
> 
> Rick Jelliffe
> 



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