Jukka K. Korpela, Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:41:41 +0200: > 2012-12-30 23:22, Costello, Roger L. wrote: > >> I have heard it stated that, in the context of character encoding >> and decoding: >> >> Interoperability is getting better. [ … ] > This seems to revolve around just the encoding of web pages, > specifically the problem that sometimes the encoding has not been > properly declared. > > I haven’t seen any data on the relative frequency of such problems, > and I don’t know what such data would be useful for. > > But in my experience, such problems have been become more common, > mainly because people using different encodings. One reason is that > people think UTF-8 is favored but don’t quite know how to use it, > e.g. declaring UTF-8 but using an authoring tool that does no > actually produce UTF-8 encoded data.
My "feeling" is that interoperability is getting better everywhere. But one field which lags behind is e-mail. Especially Web archives of e-mail (for instance, take the WHATwg.org’s web archive). And also some e-mail programs fail to default to UTF-8. Inter op is getting better because 1. "we" move towards one encoding (UTF-8) 2. an aspect of 1. is that we put more restrictions on ourselves - we respect the conventions. E.g. HTML5 "blesses" Win-1252 as the real default. 3. "we" understand the problem(s) better. (E.g. I used to think that it was good if a tool supported multiple encodings - and in a way it is good, but … it is much more important that the tool defaults to UTF-8.) There probably most productive is to file bugs against each an every tool that doesn’t default to UTF-8. -- leif halvard silli