I would not say that override should be impossible. I was merely saying that
if the given charset is specified and is correct, and you change it to
something invalid.... then it is their fault if the results are bad.
michka
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Rosenne" <rosenne@qsm.co.il>
To: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Friday, July 07, 2000 9:37 AM
Subject: RE: How-To handle i18n when you don't know charset?
> Unfortunately, there are many Hebrew pages wrongly marked as 8859-1, and
many more unmarked. So letting the user override the charset specification
is necessary. I was told similar situations are known in Russia and Greece.
>
> Jony
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Antoine Leca [mailto:Antoine.Leca@renault.fr]
> > Sent: Friday, July 07, 2000 2:06 PM
> > To: Unicode List
> > Subject: Re: How-To handle i18n when you don't know charset?
> >
> >
> > Michael Kaplan wrote:
> > >
> > > > My experimentation indicated that if the user did not have
> > their browser
> > > > set to auto-select encoding, or if they manually overrode the
encoding
> > > > selection, the form data would be sent in whatever they had chosen,
> > > > regardless of what charset may be in the <meta
> > http-equiv="Content-Type"
> > > > ...> in the HTML document head.
> > >
> > > My general feeling of people who specifically change settings
> > so that the
> > > text was rendered properly and then they specificically changed it is
as
> > > follows:
> > >
> > > THEY DESERVE WHATEVER THEY GET.
> >
> > My own experimentations (and large practice, *UNFORTUNATELY*), is that
> > to have to manually specifying the encoding is a hack, being there to
> > avoid the initial overview of authoring software that does not enforce
> > an uniform *and* practical encoding scheme (either "all should be
> > Unicode",
> > or "the day you use something outside ASCII, it should be tagged").
> >
> > Problem is worse in some cases (mainly Cyrillic), because a number of
> > charsets are equaly in common use, mainly for historical reasons.
> > And the behaviour of Microsoft in this area is not necessary of help...
> >
> >
> > Now, most of the time I run with "default" on. Sometimes, I need
> > to change.
> > And when I change, I let it in the changed position (Yes, I'm quite
lazy),
> > unless there is a nuisance. So quite a time, I am running in "changed"
> > position...
> >
> > > The GIGO (garbage in, garbage out ) philospophy is the best way
> > to go here,
> > > IMHO. How much more can you do other than provide a java applet
> > that will
> > > hav a big hand come out of the screen and slap them silly?
> >
> > And *I* would be quite upset if, when I answer in French (using French
> > accents) in an application that only proposes English as UI and asks for
> > e.g. my profession, so I would be upset if the application:
> > - either refuse to handle my accentuated profession
> > - or, perhaps worse, misinterprets it because the server-side
> > insists on using
> > his charset instead of whatever character I really need.
> >
> > But this is what happens every day, because the (U.S. based) programmer
is
> > expecting everyone to use ASCII, of course. Here we cannot
> > distinguish GIGO
> > for lazyness or plain ignorance.
> >
> > Now you take the case of my friend M. Lebœuf, whom name includes a
> > character not easily available in common charsets, trying to answer such
> > a form included in a iso-8859-1 html page... I am not sure he will
> > appreciate to see his name considered as garbage...
> >
> >
> > Antoine
> >
>
>
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