[whatwg] API for encoding/decoding ArrayBuffers into text

[NARUSE, Yui]

2012/3/21 Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc>:
> I'm pretty sure there is consensus for supporting UTF8. UTF8 is
> stateful though can be made not stateful by not consuming all
> characters and instead forcing the caller to keep the state (in the
> form of unconsumed text).

Your use of the word "stateful" involves misunderstanding.
Usually the word "stateful encoding" means that the encoding keeps a state
between characters, not bytes.
What you mean is usually expressed by the word "multibyte".
UTF-8 is multibyte encoding, and it needs to keep a state on streaming.

> So I would rephrase your 3 options above as:
>
> 1) Create an API which forces consumers to do state handling. Probably
> leading to people creating wrappers which essentially implement option
> 3
> 2) Don't support streaming
> 3) Have encoder/decoder objects which hold state
>
> I personally don't think 1 is a good option since it's basically the
> same as 3 but just with libraries doing some of the work. We might as
> well do that work so that libraries aren't needed.
>
> This leaves us with 2 or 3. So the question is if we should support
> streaming or not. I suspect doing so would be worth it.

I think it should provide non streaming API.
And if there are concreate use case, provide streaming API as another one.

-- 
NARUSE, Yui  <naruse at airemix.jp>