Re: [xsl] Namespace Identifiers - URI, URN, URL?

Subject: Re: [xsl] Namespace Identifiers - URI, URN, URL?
From: "Michael Beddow" <mbnospam@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 22:19:16 +0100
Tom,

I was really only concerned to re-write those phrases by the original
poster which I thought needed modification where encoding issues were
concerned, and I wasn't intending complete endorsement about the effects
of leaving off the encoding declaration or the use of "validity".

I agree with you that in general
> The real trouble is that a person can't easily determine what the
true - as
> opposed to the claimed or imagined - encoding really is.  Until this
is
> possible, the encoding declaration can still turn out the be
inaccurate.  It
> seems we need a document checker that can determine if a document's
actual
> encoding is consistent with some particular declaration

but I think that most cases that crop up here involve two common
scenarios, which are easily enough resolved if people are clear enough
about the basic issues. 1) Documents containing text in an ISO-8859-X
encoding are fed to an XML parser with an incorrect encoding declaration
(either explicit or defaulted), and people who are unclear about the
distinction between character sets and encodings don't understand what's
going wrong. 2) A correctly-declared ISO-8859-X encoded input document
is output in utf-8 encoding, then viewed in an application that isn't
utf-8 aware, leading to complaints that is contains "garbage" when the
application tries to render utf-8 multi-byte sequences as strings of
8-bit encoded characters. Both cases are simply enough to fix, once the
problem is recognised for what it is. But as the archives show, despite
a lot of documentation in the FAQ and repeated explanations on-list,
people keep failing to recognise the problem, let alone solve it. Which,
I think, means that those of us who understand the issue still haven't
found an effective way of expressing that understanding, so we need to
keep working at it.

Michael
---------------------------------------------------------
Michael Beddow   http://www.mbeddow.net/
XML and the Humanities page:  http://xml.lexilog.org.uk/
---------------------------------------------------------


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