Article:		XML on the Web Has Failed
Subject:		Oh come on
Date:		2004-07-21 21:55:33
From:		DarrenOakey
Don't be ridiculous - XML on the web is being used for many many thing extremelely well.. When it comes down to it, 99.9999% of people and applications couldn't care less about the character encoding - XML is uses as a "universal" file format, and for what people are using it for, it works perfectly. The number of applications for it that actually do require true multi-language/multi-encoding capability are both insignificant and irrelevant. In fact, if XML only supported UTF-8 it would lose zero value. NO-ONE CARES. (well, ok, you do - but you assertion that XML has failed is just silly)

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• Oh come on
  2005-11-04 11:18:15 ThomasPausD [Reply]
  
  It is exactly people like you that are the reason for the proplem discussed here. Living in a world where the language is that simple, that ASCII always is sufficient and beeing ignorant.

  
  There is a world outside english speaking countrys! And by the way, the US has about 293,000,000 inhabitants that is about 4.45% of the worlds population of about 6,477,000,000 and not 99.9999%. Add some other english speaking countries and you probably will not even reach 10%.

  
  I agree with many comments on this page: you need a better education and you should be much less ignorant!
  
  

• Oh come on
  2004-07-22 05:32:03 John Vance [Reply]
  
  99.9999% of the people living in your geographic location don't care. Everybody else agrees that character encoding issues are one of the top-5 barriers in interoperability, especially when using XML. There are banking software projects costing multiple million Euros that have failed because of this.

  
  Here's the real problem: nobody gets educated about that stuff. At my university one of the professors told us that Unicode characters are always 16bit wide and that only "40000 or so" are in use. Try to hire someone who understands this mess... try to figure out the difference between the 16+ possibilities to declare a String in Visual C++... that all contributes to the problem, every day!
  
  

• Oh come on
  2004-07-21 23:43:40 Moof [Reply]
  
  No one cares?

  
  Try working in some parts of Europe, specifically the ones with the new currency. As a programmer, tryign to work out when that symbol comes up is a bugger. ISO-Latin-1 is dead, but looks indistinguishable from ISO-Latin-9 - you can sort of make an educated guess that anything these day that uses the character which is the euro in Latin-9 is probably a euro, nobody used the previous one, but it's still anoying that you have to write an encoding guesser before converting it all to unicode for use internally.

  
  Of course, Microsoft decided to be annoying and put their euro in some place completely different. What's worse, a lot of clueless people seem to have decided that Microsoft Codepage 1252 is actually Latin-1 and use the terms interchangeably.

  
  There is also much fun for webpages that declare themselves as Latin-1, and might get a euro character by return in a textbox - every browser sends that in a different way, and there is no metadata capable of telling you what encoding the browser used.