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

[Chris Maloney <voldrani@gmail.com>]

Roger wrote:

> I would advocate using UTF-8 exclusively

That's what I do with my own files, and what I advocate whenever I
have any input to design decisions, but as Liam and others have said,
it's not practical to expect everyone to adopt this convention.

What I really want to know is, when can we start freely using BOMs in
UTF-8?  I really like this idea, because it is a simple, easy way for
a text file to "declare" that it is in UTF-8, and eliminate the
ambiguity when the text files are passed around.  Unfortunately, a lot
of software, especially on Linux, still chokes on these.

On a slightly different topic (UTF-16), this discussion reminded of
something else I read a while back, a technical note the Unicode
Consortium advocating for the use of UTF-16 for internal processing
(as opposed to file interchange):
http://unicode.org/notes/tn12/tn12-1.html.  On the other hand, I just
found from a Google search this recent thread on StackExchange, where
several people argue that UTF-16 should be considered harmful:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/102205/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmful.
 I guess the debate will rage on, but interoperability, on the whole,
does seem to be getting better.

Chris




On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 2:36 PM, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I spoke with George Cristian Bina from oXygen XML and he gave me the scoop on how things work inside oXygen.
>
> George told me to do this:
>
> 1. Create an iso-8859-1 encoded XML file.
>
> 2. Using a hex editor, change encoding="iso-8859-1" to encoding="utf-8"
>
> 3. Drag and drop the file into oXygen.
>
> 4. oXygen will generate an encoding exception:
>
>     Cannot open the specified file. Got a character
>     encoding exception [snip]
>
> Next, here is something George told me. It is mind-blowing:
>
>     If you have an iso-8859-1 encoded XML file loaded into oXygen
>     and change encoding="iso-8859-1" to encoding="utf-8" then
>     oXygen will automatically change the encoding of every character
>     in the document to UTF-8.
>
> Wow!
>
> That is so fantastic, I jumped out of my chair when I read it.
>
> I just received this additional information from George:
>
>     Please note that the encoding is important only when the file is loaded
>     and saved. When the file is loaded the bytes are converted to characters
>     and then the application works only with characters. When the file is
>     saved then those characters need to be converted to bytes and the
>     encoding used will be determined from the XML header with a default to
>     UTF-8 if no encoding can be detected.
>
> /Roger
>
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