On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 03:06:09AM -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > That's sometimes true. On the other hand, if you accept workarounds, > you may end up supporting them from now til forever. Whereas if you > refuse to implement workarounds, and force people to fix their systems, > sometimes it will be easier to just fix the systems, and you see the > buggy behavior disappear. > > Bad HTML that browsers bork on gets fixed. Bad HTML that browsers accept > doesn't. Apache implemented the HTTP (2?) spec in a way that AOL didn't > work with. Apache, being right, didn't back down, and AOL fixed their > servers and browsers. GCC and Linux developers regularly have spats about > illegal C in the kernel. The Linux developers regularly fix such C so the > kernel compiles with later compilers.
I'm in complete agreement with you on all of this. The problem is that if we try to push the "real" fixes for the yen/backslash problem on people, they simply won't take them. If we tell CP932 users, "your 0x5C is a yen symbol, so translate it to a Unicode yen symbol", what will they do? Probably say "no, that'll break almost all applications", just like our applications would break if we changed ISO-8859-1 backslashes to Unicode yen symbols. We could tell them, "most encodings are ASCII-compatible from 0x20 to 0x7E, but yours isn't; change 0x5C to a backslash for consistency", we're making a pretty heavy request: to change an encoding that's been in active use for a long time. > In this case, the OGG spec may not make much difference (who uses Yen signs > and Backslashes in MP3 tags?). But given the choice between complex behavior > and simpler, more correct behavior that won't matter much in the end, I'd go > with the simple correct behavior. Then it's going to be implemented more > consistently, and you never have to try and deprecate it once it's a moot > point. For the ogg tags, I'll probably suggest that it convert CP932 0x5C to a correct Unicode yen symbol, and end up with CP932 clients that can't enter backslash symbols at all (instead of ones that can't enter yen symbols at all.) This is assuming I can get them to agree to standardizing the nonstandard translation tables (for the purposes of Ogg.) -- Glenn Maynard -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/