Re: Names for UTF-8 with and without BOM

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Sat Nov 02 2002 - 19:01:53 EST

  • Next message: Tex Texin: "Re: Names for UTF-8 with and without BOM"

    Tex Texin scripsit:

    > However, that leaves open the question whether only the Unicode
    > transform signatures are acceptable or other signatures are also
    > allowed. So if a vendor defines a code page, and defines a signature
    > (perhaps mapping BOM/ZWNSP specifically to some code point or byte
    > string) does that then become acceptable?

    IMHO yes. XML documents are not *required* to be in one of the character
    sets that can be automatically detected by the methods of Appendix F.
    You can encode your documents in (hypothetical) JOECODE, which uses leading
    00 as a signature (ignored by the XML parser) and then A=01, B=02, C=03, and so on.
    Autodetection will not work here, but it is perfectly conformant to have
    a processor that understands only UTF-8, UTF-16, and JOECODE.

    Of course some encodings, such as US-BSCII, which looks just like US-ASCII
    except that A=0x42, B=0x41, a=0x62, b=0x61 will cause problems for anybody.
    :-)

    I am a member of, but not speaking for, the XML Core WG.

    -- 
    John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
    "The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own
    skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among
    other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague."  --Edsger Dijkstra
    


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