Re: [xml-dev] RE: There is a serious amount of character encodingconvers

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 28/12/2012 19:45, Chris Maloney wrote:
> Roger,
>
> Here is a classic post from XML.com that is right in line with the
> topic of character encodings that you have been posting about
> recently, titled "XML on the web has failed":
> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/07/21/dive.html
>
>
Well, it's a very sensible article spoilt by a very silly title. What 
the title should be is "XML has failed to solve the problem of character 
miscoding", and that of course is true, and is inevitably true, because 
so long as we have programs exchanging "strings" with each other 
(whether by procedure calls, on the wire, or via file storage) without 
also exchanging reliable and secure metadata about the character 
encoding of those strings, character miscoding will continue to be a 
problem. XML has done its bit to solve that problem, and has made a 
useful contribution (as has HTTP), but there's no way XML can solve the 
problem on its own.

Just consider: can we ban people from using text editors that allow you 
to put encoding="utf-8" in an XML declaration when the file is actually 
iso 8859-1? Until we can, how can we solve the miscoding problem?

Michael Kay
Saxonica