Re: Unicode FAQ addendum

From: Elliotte Rusty Harold (elharo@metalab.unc.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 20 2000 - 08:12:13 EDT


At 8:00 AM -0800 7/19/00, John Cowan wrote:
>The new Unicode FAQ (like the old) supplies the panting world with
>John's Own Version of Unicode Conformance:
>
>1) Unicode code units are 16 bits long; deal with it.
>2) Byte order is only an issue in files.

I've got to take issue with #2. People can and do serve big and
little endian documents over network sockets, out of databases, and
various other things that aren't files. And it is important to know
which you've got when you read one of these.

However, if by #2 you mean "Byte order is only an issue in streams,
but not when you're receiving strings through an API like SAX that
can properly decode whatever stream it's sitting on top of", then I
see your point. But it might help to be a little more explicit.

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible (IDG Books, 1999) |
| http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764532367/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java news: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML news: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:06 EDT