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

spinoza1111 said:

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!

How is that relevant to my point?

For example,
it would encode the blank as 64 and not 32.

So what? There's nothing magical about 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,

So what? I wasn't addressing that issue. I was addressing the claim that
"the &name; format" is dependent on ASCII.

and, insofar as the data makes "sense" in either
encoding, such a philosophy exposes your clients to the risk of
undetected errors in transmission.

What philosophy? All I was doing was pointing out the incorrectness of a
claim about ASCII. This doesn't imply any kind of philosophy whatsoever.

--
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
.

Relevant Pages