Re: Fun with proof by analogy, was Re: Mojibake on my Web pages

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Fri Sep 26 2003 - 03:14:16 EDT

  • Next message: jameskass@att.net: "Re: Internal Representation of Unicode"

    > > The last agent handling the document would be the mail carrier.
    > > Does the mail carrier have the right to open the mailing and
    > > replace your document with garbage?
    >
    > No, however if I receive a letter in the post written in German I'm
    > going to ask someone to translate it rather than try to cope with a
    > language (c.f. encoding) I don't understand.

    Unlike Jame's cup of wine, this really is a good analogy. Suppose the
    document is stored on the server in ISO 8859-1 and the browser requesting
    the page understands only EBCDIC. The server must convert it -- if it
    doesn't, it will appear on the client as complete garbage. As Jon
    mentioned, the server is the last one to touch it, and this illustrates
    why it is appropriate for the server to touch it.

    Peter

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Sep 26 2003 - 04:07:41 EDT