From: Lars Kristan (lars.kristan@hermes.si)
Date: Sat Jan 22 2005 - 05:23:27 CST
Christopher Fynn wrote:
> MS do still provide edit.com which runs in the Windows
> console - and there
> are plenty of better third party alternatives.
Oh, they fixed edit.com, it no longer consumes 100% CPU. Very well done. Can
it be used to edit UTF-8 text?
Definitely not. Microsoft already went through one change. The edit.com is
intended to edit DOS files. Those in OEM encoding. It doesn't respect
CP_ACP. Maybe it respects CP_OEMCP, I am not sure.
I am well aware of the availablity of other editors. The only problem is
that less experienced (or less equipped) users are often tempted to use
Notepad for the task of editing plain text files.
What notepad should do is perhaps make a distinction between its .txt
documents and plain text files. Which would be all others. It should not
emit BOM when saving a .bat file, it should not emit a BOM when saving a
.htm file.
Of course they can decide to fix cmd.exe to ignore BOM. And fix it so it
executes batch files when in CP=65000 in the first place. Consuming BOMs is
optional, while emitting them will prove to be a pain even within Windows
itself. Which is why I think they haven't fixed it already.
As for the .htm, I have to admit I don't know what standards say. Frankly, I
don't care. Whatever they say, they might be wrong. IMO, HTML files are
plain text. Encoding issues are covered by the directives. Encoding could
even be switched within that document. It already is. Up to the first
directive, the encoding is ASCII. At least I would define it that way, don't
know if it actually is. If the BOM is allowed, it should only be valid (if
at all) up until the first directive. Opening a .htm file in text mode might
then be a pain.
Lars
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Jan 22 2005 - 05:26:03 CST