On May 10, 2007, at 7:13 PM, Michal S. wrote:
to remind the web developer that it should be fixed.
Thanks
Michal
True that it would be nice if the user-agent could alert that the
encoding is being guessed at and is actually unknown, but…
how many average users even know what an encoding is? Few. Many
programmers don’t even know about it. It’s a situation caused by
history. In the past, systems were more expensive and less powerful.
Compromises were frequently made. (Y2K bug was a result of the same
problem.) Now there is a sense of unlimited potential for storage and
processing power, but there is still the legacy content and still
content being produced following many different standards.
Some of the problems with web development are also a result of the
first browser war between netscape and microsoft.
At one time there were dozens of ASCII variants out there as well,
hard-coded into machines. Eventually this stuff will all be replaced
by unicode. It has the momentum. The current problem is still partial
implementations and different implementations. Even at the OS level.
I don’t know on windows, but much of this functionality is a service
in OS X, it is provided freely to the programmer by the system.
Still, there are programmers in OS X who just avoid the issue. Cocoa
makes it easy for those developers to support all the languages it
supports in unicode. TextMate, the premier Ruby/Rails editor on OS X,
is a great example of this. It doesn’t support CJK properly. Odd,
because TextEdit does, because it recieves all of that support free
from the system.
Windows must surely have a similar offering to its developers.
Still there are lots of crusty developers out there who don’t see an
issue with this.
So we continue to get a lot of accepted problems with language
support.
The first scripting language to really start to push unicode will be
the winner in the future.