[xml-dev] Quiz: How do you put a Euro sign in your data if your XMLuses

["Timothy W. Cook" <timothywayne.cook@gmail.com>]

Ouch.  I didn't realize the problem was globally this huge.  Thanks
for the insights.  At least now I know to watch out for it.

--Tim

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:
>
>
> I've been advising people how to solve character encoding issues for about
> 100 years, but our own internal system for handling Saxon license requestsh
> still gets it wrong. It ain't easy.
>
>> For what it's worth, 1: Joel Spolsky's article on "The Absolute Minimum
>> Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and
>> Character Sets (No Excuses!)"
>> <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html> is quite good, I
>> think.
>
>
> The thread seems to be pointing to two conclusions:
>
> (a) there are people who don't understand the theory, and need to be
> educated (I don't know if Roger's insight about &x80 really was a new
> discovery for him, if so I am rather shocked).
>
> (b) but even if you do understand the theory, it's still hard to get it
> right in practice, because our systems are complex and built from
> heterogeneous components, many of which are outside our control, cannot be
> easily changed, and are poorly documented; the more complex they become, the
> more opportunities there are for data to be corrupted across the component
> boundaries.
>
> The underlying problem is that components throw bytes at each other without
> first agreeing what they mean, and because it works most of the time (i.e.
> when you speak English) people live with the problem rather than fixing it;
> and because they don't fix it, it gets worse.
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica
>
>
>
>
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