Re: Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum

On Dec 31, 5:09 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Malcolm McLean said:

<snip>

The &name; format is dependent on ASCII

No, it isn't. The same syntax can be used in any character set that
supports the lower case letters, the ampersand, and the semicolon. And the
same *idea* could be used even if those specific characters were not
available. EBCDIC, which obviously does support the ampersand and
semicolon, could support that format easily.


... while losing the fact that the codes are in EBCDIC! For example,
it would encode the blank as 64 and not 32.

You are ignoring the fact that the HTML encoding, as opposed to XML
and unicode, doesn't contain the information needed to reconstruct the
actual data, and, insofar as the data makes "sense" in either
encoding, such a philosophy exposes your clients to the risk of
undetected errors in transmission.



--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999

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