[whatwg] Null characters

[Cameron Zemek]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> I could add a note... based on what Boris described, what would you want
> the note to say and where would you want it placed, such that you would
> have seen it when your original reading caused you to e-mail the list?
>
> (This part of the spec is rather large, and the NULL handling happens all
> over the place, so I don't know where would be best.)

I was thinking either in section "12.2.2 The input byte stream" or
"12.2.2.4 Preprocessing the input stream" could mention the NULL
character handling.

>> It makes text unreadable.  Consider text that's actually UTF-16 but
>> being declared as ISO-8859-1.  If you strip the nulls, it all works out.
>> But if you don't, every other character is a replacement character.
>>
>> This is not a rare situation on the web, unfortunately.

:( this is unfortunate considering the author/developer of these
documents has done the wrong thing. But that is the nature of the web
I suppose. Thanks for explaining the reason for this.