From: John Joyce Date: 2007-05-10T19:48:21+09:00 Subject: Re: A question for people with English OS On May 10, 2007, at 7:13 PM, Michal Suchanek wrote: > It may be viewed as refusal to follow standards and encouraging bad > webmaster practices (using some proprietary Windows encoding and > relying on Explorer to guess right). On the other hand, it could be > seen as an attempt to remove some burden from the users. A web browser > developer may implement scheme for guessing the encoding on sites that > do not specify it but cannot fix the sites. > > However, the right implementation would also include a big fat warning > about the encoding being guessed. This serves both to let the user > know that the site is deficient and may be displayed incorrectly and > to remind the web developer that it should be fixed. > > Thanks > > Michal > True that it would be nice if the user-agent could alert that the encoding is being guessed at and is actually unknown, but... how many average users even know what an encoding is? Few. Many programmers don't even know about it. It's a situation caused by history. In the past, systems were more expensive and less powerful. Compromises were frequently made. (Y2K bug was a result of the same problem.) Now there is a sense of unlimited potential for storage and processing power, but there is still the legacy content and still content being produced following many different standards. Some of the problems with web development are also a result of the first browser war between netscape and microsoft. At one time there were dozens of ASCII variants out there as well, hard-coded into machines. Eventually this stuff will all be replaced by unicode. It has the momentum. The current problem is still partial implementations and different implementations. Even at the OS level. I don't know on windows, but much of this functionality is a service in OS X, it is provided freely to the programmer by the system. Still, there are programmers in OS X who just avoid the issue. Cocoa makes it easy for those developers to support all the languages it supports in unicode. TextMate, the premier Ruby/Rails editor on OS X, is a great example of this. It doesn't support CJK properly. Odd, because TextEdit does, because it recieves all of that support free from the system. Windows must surely have a similar offering to its developers. Still there are lots of crusty developers out there who don't see an issue with this. So we continue to get a lot of *accepted* problems with language support. The first scripting language to really start to push unicode will be the winner in the future.