> > Paul Chase Dempsey:
> > We'll have to deal with multiple untagged codepages/encodings/charsets
> > for a long time yet. It's unlikely we'll get file systems to carry any
> > meta-information beyond the filename in any portable way and certainly
> > not retroactively.
>
> Frank da Cruz
> I most emphatically recommend against using filenames for this purpose ..
I emphatically agree. I meant to say that the name is the only information
you can expect a file system to maintain apart the data in the file. I did
not mean to imply that the name should be used to encode any other
information. If I did, I would have proposed a notation.
Without a reliable means to capture the encoding external to the bits in the
file itself, I suggest the standardization of Unicode file signatures. These
are already in common use except for UTF-8, and it's useful to extend the
practice to UTF-8.
...
> Frank da Cruz
> Even now, there exists such a standard, albeit unwritten, for 8-bit text.
> For example, almost every word processor and web browser has a "Save as"
> option for "plain text with line breaks" which, in the general case, is
the
> only reliable interchange format. What will be the Unicode equivalent?
Exactly the same, except Unicode data intead of 8-bit MBCS data.
So let's write down the unwritten!
Regards,
--- Paul Chase Dempsey
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT