On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 8:59 AM, Glenn Adams <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 3:49 AM, Henri Sivonen <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:12 AM, Kenneth Russell <[email protected]> wrote: >> > The StringEncoding proposal is the best path forward because it >> > provides correct behavior in all cases. >> >> Do you mean this one? http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/StringEncoding >> >> I see the following problems after a cursory glance: >> 4) It says "Browsers MAY support additional encodings." This is a >> huge non-interoperability loophole. The spec should have a small and >> fixed set of supported encodings that everyone MUST support and >> supporting other encodings should be a "MUST NOT". > > > In practice, it will be impractical if not impossible to enforce such a > dictum "MUST NOT support other encodings". Implementers will support > whatever they like when it comes to character encodings, both for > interchange, runtime storage, and persistent storage.
Actually, such requirements often work relatively well. Many implementors recognize the pain caused by race-to-the-bottom support for random encodings. ~TJ
