Re: Coding system sniffing.

Wednesday, 16 May 2007

 Ar an seachtú lá déag de mí Bealtaine, scríobh Stephen J. Turnbull: 

...
 Aidan Kehoe writes:

  > Reliably differentiating those [bit-for-bit identical] pairs
  > without metadata is not possible.

 And unnecessary, precisely because it's not possible.  
With metadata, it is. Which is why I want useful metadata. 

...
 It's only when you add disambiguating text that it matters, and
then the
 Sufficiently Smart Program argument applies. 
If you assume that no other program is processing the file, then yes. Which
is not a very useful starting point to people who do other things than hack
XEmacs.

If you’re working on a website, and you’ve configured Apache to send
ISO-8859-15 headers for every file served, and you’re editing a PHP file
with character literals, it is not appropriate for XEmacs to encode the Euro
sign as a tilde because it thinks the file is in ISO-8859-1.

...
  > Gzip and bzip2 legitimately don’t try to undo damage to files
that
  > have been corrupted by FTP, and no-one expects them to.
  > Encouraging data corruption is not a particularly worthy goal,

 *sigh* Translating a file from ISO-8859-5 to KOI8-R is not data
 corruption any more than compressing a file with gzip is. 
ISO-8859-5 and KOI8-R have differing repertoires. Unconditionally
translating from the former to the latter loses data. Unconditionally
translating from the latter to the former loses data. That is corruption.

...
 Unless there's a protocol that labels the file with its encoding,
and
 some programs respect it while others ignore it.  The latter may
 "corrupt" the file by translating, or by adding new data to a file that
 originally conformed to both encodings.

 Which is precisely the possibility that you propose to introduce.  It
 is therefore your responsibility to at least think about ways to deal
 with the inevitable corruption, ie, incorrect cookies. 
Warnings, warnings, warnings. GNU has them. 

...
 I know why you want cookies; I don't deny that they are a useful
 private protocol.  I just don't want you imposing the *known* problems
 with them on others without thinking about how to alleviate those
 problems. 
Imposing? You’re aware they’re already there, right? 

-- 
On the quay of the little Black Sea port, where the rescued pair came once
more into contact with civilization, Dobrinton was bitten by a dog which was
assumed to be mad, though it may only have been indiscriminating. (Saki)

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