Dear Xalan Developers, I would first like to congratulate and thank all of you for providing the XML developer's community with a usefull tool like Xalan, and especially Xalan for Java which I would find extremelly helpfull in my line of work.
I'm using the expression "would find" for the following reason: As documented in Apache Bug DB (Bug #1639) Xalan for Java escapes characters for ISO encodings other than ISO-8859-1. This practically means that Xalan (and therefore the rest of the Apache XML framework) becomes unusable in countries using XML files in other encodings, like ISO-8859-7 for Greece. Since I work in a university that has a policy of using Open Source S/W and especially Apache S/W (which we also mirror) you can understand my disappointment when I found that Xalan didn't support Greek and that the task of making it i18n wasn't even in the developer's to-do list (http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/todo.html). Of course I understand your considerations about performance issues but I think that the added value of making Xalan work with other encodings compensates for slower performance, if performance degradation is inevitable. Also I put faith in your technical skills to minimize a side effect like that to the minimum. Thank you for your valuable time, Dionysios G. Synodinos. PS: Consider me available for any testing or feedback consearning xalan for java and i18n.
