On Wed, 26 Feb 1997, Francois Yergeau wrote:
> 19:23 26-02-97 +0000, Jon Knight a écrit :
> >My
> >point is that not having defaults will make the situation worse, not
> >better.
>
> Could you please expand on that? I think I have made a rather good case
> against non-universally usable defaults, showing how they actually
> decreased worldwide interoperability in HTTP, so I am interested in your
> thinking on why not having them would make things worse.
I disagreed with your premise; I don't think that having defaults in HTTP
and HTML has decreased worldwide interoperability. If anything its helped
it because if a document isn't tagged as having some other charset, you
know its ISO-8859-1 so you can make a stab at displaying to the user. It
helps with the old adage of be conservative in what you generate and
tolerant in what you receive.
I think that the lack of non-ISO-8859-1/English documents is just due to
either lack of demand, difficulty creating them or tools to handle them.
We're certainly seeing that with the ROADS software which does support
HTML output in multiple languages and charsets but few people seem to want
to use it as they view their services as of worldwide interest which means
"in English" (like it or not). If there was no default, I would guess
that we'd have roughly the same documents out on the web except that the
HTTP protocol would explicitly say that the charset was ISO-8859-1.
Having the default means that when that line in the headers is missing
(which it usually is), we still know what to do with the document and we
don't just drop it on the floor.
> >We need a
> >known default interpretation of the metadata in a DC record and having
>
> Why?
BECAUSE I WANT TO KNOW HOW TO PROCESS METADATA WITH NO QUALIFIERS!! Sorry
for shouting but I've said it lots of times and that's the last time I'm
going to say it folks.
> >unknown default languages, charsets and encodings just isn't acceptable in
> >my view.
>
> Why?
See the shouting line above.
Tatty bye,
Jim'll
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
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