[whatwg] base64 entities

[And Clover]

On 2010-08-26 13:58:24, Julian Reschke wrote:

> Not convinced. There's already one way to escape these things, and this
> is supported in all UAs.

Totally agree. If a web author isn't sufficiently experienced to 
remember to call an HTML-encoding function, there is no reason to 
believe they'll think to call a base64-encoding function either. The 
proposal adds more parsing complexity (and XML incompatibility) for no 
obvious gain.

However, I'm all for making standardised HTML-encoder/decoder and 
base64-encoder/decoder functions available at a `window` or ECMAScript 
language level.

`atob`/`btoa` do the job, but they're byte encoders not characters; they 
expect 'binary' strings where each charCode is the ordinal value of a 
byte. That is to say, they `btoa` encodes the input string using 
genuine-ISO-8859-1 and not UTF-8. This is necessary for a 
general-purpose base64 implementation (otherwise many base64 strings 
would not be decodable at all), but may be unexpected.

Is it worth providing a UTF-8-based variant or argument? Otherwise users 
would have to convert from UTF-8-misdecoded-as-ISO-8859-1 strings 
manually. (That's not difficult, using `decodeURIComponent(escape(s))`, 
but this trick isn't obvious or well-known.)

-- 
And Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/