On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 2:56 AM, Graham Dumpleton <graham.dumple...@gmail.com> wrote: > As others have pointed out, the likes of rack and jack, not sure about > the new Perl variant, don't seem to have an issue with using unicode.
I looked up Jack and Rack: http://jackjs.org/jsgi-spec.html and http://rack.rubyforge.org/doc/files/SPEC.html They don't have an issue with unicode because they don't mention it and don't specify anything at all. Basically they punt on the issue. In the specific case, most things in Javascript have to be unicode. The response body iterator must have items that respond to toByteString, which includes String and Binary. I'm assuming Strings always use UTF8 in Javascript, as JSON acts that way. jsgi.input is only specified as an "input stream", which is very unspecified. Especially since jsgi.errors is an "output stream", though presumably one should be binary and the other text. Ruby's unicode is kind of funny (as I understand it), in a way that might help them. Strings are stored as binary with an attached encoding. So there's no "unicode", only binary strings with encodings; so you can change the encoding, or transcoding happens implicitly when you combine strings from different encodings. So basically there's no mention of unicode because they've dodged that whole bullet. But it also seems to be unspecified what encoding might be attached to strings, if any at all. Another example, neither spec even indicates if SCRIPT_NAME/PATH_INFO are url-decoded (or that they aren't decoded). So, in summary: I don't see anything we can learn from these specs, and there's no reason we should feel like we've somehow been leapfrogged, instead these other specifications are underspecified. I also think on Web-SIG we are approaching this with more robust and general applications in mind than for Jack and Rack -- for instance, I would like WSGI to be a reasonable basis for an HTTP proxy, where you can't enforce UTF8-everywhere. If all we wanted for WSGI was to be a layer for serving monolithic applications then these issues wouldn't be so important. -- Ian Bicking | http://blog.ianbicking.org | http://topplabs.org/civichacker _______________________________________________ Web-SIG mailing list Web-SIG@python.org Web SIG: http://www.python.org/sigs/web-sig Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/web-sig/archive%40mail-archive.com
