From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sat May 13 2006 - 00:06:47 CDT
Keutgen, Walter <walter dot keutgen at be dot unisys dot com> wrote:
> Microsoft should leave the ill formed UTF-8 sequences aside for the
> determination of the coded character set.
I agree that if encodings need to be autodetected, allowing invalid
UTF-8 to be handled as though it were valid UTF-8 hampers that effort.
It is a shame --but as Mark Davis said, probably a given -- that
autodetection is necessary at all.
> Or alternatively, would it not be simpler to stick to the standards
> and choose ISO-8859-1 when the HTML source does not provide any
> charset.
Actually, the code to do what IE does is of about equal complexity to
the code to interpret UTF-8 strictly. I doubt it had anything to do
with that.
> More philosophically, is it really better to try making it better than
> the standards?
I *strongly* doubt that Microsoft is trying to reinvent UTF-8. As I
said, they were probably trying to "be liberal in what they accept," and
not have people throw eggs at their windows because some badly encoded
Web page wouldn't display.
> The reader can still correct by chosing the appropriate encoding.
> Then Microsoft could satisfy everybody by offering 'UTF-8 strict' and
> 'UTF-8 liberal' or better, if the UTF-8 stream contains ill formed
> sequences, offering the user to accept them by a pop-up dialogue.
How many users who do not subscribe to the Unicode list would understand
how to use an option like that?
-- Doug Ewell Fullerton, California, USA http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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