Re: [xml-dev] "Interoperability is getting better" ... What does that me

[Chris Maloney <voldrani@gmail.com>]

I think so.  I don't have any data to back it up, but that's my
impression anyway.  It used to be very common to see these kinds of
bugs even in, for example, websites of major newspapers.  I'm thinking
in particular of smart quotes being rendered as, for example, “Good
morning, Dave”.  I don't notice that kind of thing as often.


On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 8:10 AM, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> Several people have stated:
>
>     Interoperability, on the whole,
>     does seem to be getting better.
>
> In the context of our discussion on character encoding, what does that mean?
>
> I will take a stab at defining what it means:
>
> Interoperability means that you and I interpret (decode) the bytes in the XML file in the same way.
>
> Example: I create an XML file and I encode all the characters in it using UTF-8. Here is a graphical depiction (i.e., glyphs) of the bytes that I send to you:
>
>     <Name>López</Name>
>
> You receive my XML document but you interpret the bytes as iso-8859-1.
>
> Oops!
>
> Now the trouble begins.
>
> In UTF-8 the ó is a graphical depiction of the LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH ACUTE character and it is encoded inside the computer using these two bytes: C3 B3
>
> But in iso-8859-1 the two bytes C3 B3 is the encoding of two characters:
>
>      C3 is the encoding of the à character
>      B3 is the encoding of the ³ character
>
> Thus, you interpret the XML as:
>
>     <Name>López</Name>
>
> We are interpreting the same XML document (i.e., the same set of bytes) differently.
>
> Interoperability has failed.
>
> So, when we say:
>
>     Interoperability is getting better.
>
> we mean that the number of occurrences of senders and receivers interpreting the bytes in an XML document is decreasing.
>
> Is that correct?
>
> /Roger
>
>
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