[whatwg] Drop UTF-32

Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi
Mon Jun 4 06:15:06 PDT 2007


On Jun 4, 2007, at 14:17, Alexey Feldgendler wrote:

> Also, even for those encodings for which a single-byte encoding  
> like Windows-1252 can be a reasonable fallback, it's doesn't seem  
> wise to me to mandate the use of Windows-1252 (or any other fixed  
> encoding) as the fallback. Some software, especially in devices,  
> already exists that only supports one or several encodings, and  
> these are the most important ones in the local market (e.g.  
> Japanese in devices sold in Japan).

I think it is perfectly reasonable to make support for UTF-8 and  
Windows-1252 part of UA conformance requirements. After all, a piece  
of software that doesn't support those two really has no business  
pretending to be a UA for the World Wide Web. Not supporting  
Windows-1252 based on "local market" arguments is serious walled- 
gardenism.

UTF-32 as an encoding for interchange, on the other hand, is nothing  
but an academic time sink for implementors.

I'm going to support UTF-32 when a decoder is available, but I'd like  
to know what a parser is to do when the decoder isn't available. (By  
default, you don't get a UTF-32 decoder with the JDK.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/





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