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Agree with Michael. Character encoding is *not* a recent problem. It may still be hard, but its not recent. Back when I was getting my Amateur Radio License (1970ihs?) I remember a strong petition to the FCC to try to allow amateur teletype to use ASCII instead of BAUDOT. 'Everyone' knew IBM machines used EBCIDIC ... (and lets not talk about Morse Code, an early multi-bit character encoding). Even those old DOS boxes had 'CodePages'. People talk about DOS a lot but really most of the early internet machines were Unix. Of course Unix (now Linux) still doesn't solve character encoding issues very well. Encoding still is a hard problem but I can't accept that Ignorance was the cause of it missing from the HTTP specs. ---------------------------------------- David A. Lee dlee@c... http://www.xmlsh.org -----Original Message----- From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@s...] Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2012 3:40 AM To: xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: RE: Encoding charset of HTTP Basic Authentication >The distinction between bytes and characters is a fairly recent development. When I bought my first computer in the 1990s it came with Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22, and the german versions of those use different "code pages"... In the Computer Science Tripos at Cambridge University they always used to ask a few open-ended questions, and I remember one from the early 1970s along the lines "Why is character encoding such a difficult thing to get right?" Forty years on, getting it right hasn't become any easier. However, I think any student answering that question would have been expected to understand the difference between characters and the bytes used to represent them. Michael Kay Saxonica _______________________________________________________________________ XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS to support XML implementation and development. To minimize spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@l... subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l... List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
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