Encodings

Sun, 17 Nov 2002 11:39:35 +0100

Hi all,

Now that we've got our own ML, we can eventually discuss about this
topic.

I must prefix that I know quite a little about encodings, besides any
symbol displayed on the screen (being an ASCII letter or a Japanese
ideogram) needs to be encoded in computer memory someway.
Recently, George Pauliuc told me something more about, thoug.  Thanks
George.

My two main concerns are about .wml and .html files.

1. HTML files should display in the language user is used to.  I hope
that changing encoding is as simple as writing the right encoding name
in the .html header.

We currently have three attributes to fill up:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

I think that UTF-8 doesn't suit everybody's needs and that the 2-letter
language ID (en, de, etc.) is not enough.  Am I right?

2. WML files should not get messed up when one just opens and saves a
.wml file.  I've heard from Debian crew that it has happend because of
some text editors.

To resize the problem, I don't think it's necessary that any web
translator were able to view other translators' translation.  What
matter is that, when a translator works on his translation, they won't
spoil others' work, just because their editor doesn't correctly handle
(by ignoring) non-Latin encodings.

-- 
email: L.Cappelletti@mail.com
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