Re: shift_jis / windows-31J

[Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:03:18 +0100, Shawn Steele  
<Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com> wrote:
> Problem is that there are 4+ implementations of shift_jis in "common"  
> use, and none of them are likely to change, since it'd break their  
> customers. :(

It would only break if the content they consumed contained code points  
that mapped to invalid characters and they relied on that, though. And the  
content was not relying on being mapped to the superset mapping of  
Windows-31J instead, which seems far more likely given the dominance of  
the Web and Windows.


> So I don't see a perfect solution here.  HTML5 is fairly clear about  
> browser behavior, but in other environments, I think the best we can do  
> is point to the variants and allow the clients to decide which version  
> they'd like to use.

HTML5 is unfortunately only clear about HTML. That it also happens for  
CSS, JavaScript, text/plain, etc. is not made at all clear. It's a  
temporary hack to illustrate a problem that really ought to be solved here.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/