Re: "Interoperability is getting better" ... What does that mean?

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 3:53 PM, Naena Guru <naenaguru_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Now the validator complains correctly that some characters in those pages do
> not belong to ISO-8859-1, if you use bullet points, ellipse etc. It says
> they come from Windows-1252. That is true. If you declare these pages as
> UFT-8, then it throws off *all* Latin-1 characters and the web pages show
> character-not-found glyph.

And if I declare myself an English citizen, getting through borders
takes a lot longer. You have to declare the pages to be what they are,
which means converting all the characters to be the proper character
set.

> There is one main consideration in the mind of the web developer: Make the
> file as small as possible.

I'm looking at Gmail, and found that pretty wood background is a half
a megabyte. If you still believe that squeezing every last byte is the
goal, I suggest that modern web design has passed you by. Looking at
most modern websites, they're spending hundreds or thousands of
kilobytes to communicate stuff that could have been done in way less
space. The Wikipedia front page is downloading 680K of Javascript; try
minimizing that before messing with anything else.

> Try this: Make a text file in Windows Notepad and
> save it in ANSI, Unicode and UTF-8 formats. ANSI file (Windows-1252) will be
> the smallest.

Not necessarily. If you've converting Arabic or Greek or Cyrillic to
HTML escapes, you're going to take up more space that way. If you're
dropping it, well, duh, throwing away data will generally save you
space.

> Why should people make their pages larger just to satisfy some
> peoples idea of perfection?

CP-1252 is a perfectly legal web character set, and nobody is going to
argue with you if you want to use it in legal ways. (I.e. writing
Latin script in it, not Sinhala.) But the death of most character sets
makes everyone's systems smaller and faster and more likely to
correctly show them the document instead of trash.

-- 
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.