Subject: Re: [xsl] International Characters in attributes From: "Michael Beddow" <mbnospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 18:02:48 -0000 |
On Saturday, February 10, 2001 1:55 PM David Carlisle wrote: (MB)>> Oh but it does, and how! That's a very WesternEuro-centric view. > Or a standards conforming view, depending on how you view it. [...] > If utf-8 encoding > is used then any XML system must support it, and most modern HTML > systems will as well, won't they? Sure, as long as you stick to the nice safe areas where utf-8 and ASCII coincide. Even there, as Jo Bourne recently reported here, many fairly recent builds of Netscape for the MAC go bananas even on ASCII range characters if they're told the encoding is utf-8. And some builds of Netscape for various Unices refuse to render html at all, treating it as plain text, if you try to set utf-8 encoding via a http header rather than a meta tag. But once you get into the areas of the BMP where utf-8 starts producing the "transformations" that the "t" stands for, with 3 or even 5-byte sequences, none of the browsers I've looked at will behave 100% properly (and some XML parsers and XSLT engines can hiccup as well). That's partly why people still use encodings other than utf-8. And once you do, the same numeric character references will mean different things in different encodings, (there aren't named entities in html for the 20,000+ Chinese characters) and so show differently in the browser. Added to which, as Mike Brown explained, it isn't entirely clear what method browsers should (let alone do) use to determine encodings. And then there are the sysadmins in CJK regions who try to ward off user problems by locking all the browsers on their site down to a specific encoding (often shift-JIS in Japan), a trick also sometimes perpetrated by ISP's when customising browsers for their users. These aren't XSLT problems, but they are very real and intractible issues that the consumers of your XSLT-generated html will encounter if they are outside W Europe or the US, and XSLT authors with i18n concerns have to face them. One of the things XSLT is actually good at is mungeing xml into html that suits the specific shortcomings of browsers that are out there now, i.e for saving people from the consequences of ignoring or mis-implementing standards. OK it would be better if that wasn't necessary, but I guess it will be for a long time yet. Michael ------------------------------------------ Michael Beddow http://www.mbeddow.net/ XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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