Re: [xml-dev] An XML document is not well-formed if encoding="..."does n

[Michael Sokolov <sokolov@ifactory.com>]

On 12/29/2012 9:38 AM, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
>
> -----------
> Question
> -----------
> This outstanding discussion has awakened me to the problems with the multiplicity of character encodings and the huge number of character encoding conversions taking place behind-the-scene.
>
> Is the solution to the problems to simply eliminate the need for conversions by mandating that every application, every IDE, every text editor, and every system worldwide adopt one character encoding, UTF-8? It that a realistic solution? If so, what is the timeframe in which it could be achieved?
>
> /Roger
>
My perspective is a bit different: I spent some early years working as 
an "internationalization" consultant. Think of the job as poring over 
programs written in C, which operated on text as bytes, hunting for 
string manipulations that would incorrectly interpret the second byte of 
an S-JIS character as an ASCII "\". And I would say that the situation 
is much improved since 1992. The problems are no less difficult, but 
they occur much less frequently: basically because of the wide adoption 
of Unicode (in particular UTF-8). Encoding issues arise, and when they 
do they are frequently mysterious and difficult to diagnose, but there 
aren't enough of them to support an entire mini-industry of consultants, 
as there were. And I don't mourn the passing of that job.

I can't see how any sort top-down universal mandate could ever succeed 
completely, but certainly within whatever one's purview may be, yes, I 
would advocate using UTF-8 exclusively.  And I think we are moving in 
that direction already, anyway.

-Mike