In article <Pine.LNX.4.61.0502041627530.8656@p...>,
 "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@p...> wrote:

> On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
> >  "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@p...> wrote:
> > 
> > > But that's OK, since any plausible encoding produced by the editor can 
> > > be transformed by rote into utf-8 prior to subsequent XML processing 
> > > (that's the XML relevance).
> > 
> > Such conversion leads to bugs like this one:
> > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=174351
> 
> Does it?  I'll have to ask you to explain that in more detail, please.  
> As far as I can see, the bug relates to a byte stream which is not 
> valid utf-8 - which by definition is therefore not utf-8 at all.
> 
> What I'm talking about is taking a properly-labelled and 
> properly-formed character stream in some known encoding, and
> transcoding that into properly-formed utf-8 (with appropriate 
> re-labelling, of course).

The problem is that the XML spec is not only concerned with proper UTF-8 
streams but also says what to do in improper cases. If the character 
encoding conversion is decoupled from the XML processor, but this is 
viewed as an implementation detail so that the combination of the 
converter and actual XML processor is subjected to the conformance 
requirements placed on XML processors, non-conformance ensues if the 
converter is lenient, which they usually are.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@i...
http://iki.fi/hsivonen/
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