XP Mail Archive: Re: XP> Relaxing XHTML-Print's restriction

Re: XP> Relaxing XHTML-Print's restriction to UTF-8 to include UTF-16

From: Michael Sweet (mike@easysw.com)
Date: Wed Sep 03 2003 - 10:25:51 EDT

  • Next message: BIGELOW,JIM (HP-Boise,ex1): "XP> XHTML-Print: change of url from xhtml-print.org to w3c.org breaks current implementations."

    don@lexmark.com wrote:
    > Jim:
    >
    > I would disagree. I don't believe that all XHTML-Print enabled
    > printers will necessarily bite the bullet and include a complete XML
    > parser that requires support for UTF-16. I don't believe we should
    > force that to occur. Perhaps you should remind the group that
    > XHTML-Print is target for LOW-END printers with this embedded. No 3
    > gigahertz Pentium 4's with 512 MB of memory!!!

    I'm not so worried about memory usage; converting UTF-16 to UTF-8
    on the input side is not expensive in terms of memory or processor.

    However, reliably detecting UTF-16 and managing the endianess of
    the words is a pain in the ass in the real world. Assuming that
    all UTF-16 files start with FFFE or FEFF, the XML parser can handle
    the UTF-16 encoding without difficulty, however certain large
    convicted software monopolies regularly omit this important
    information making autodetection unreliable.

    Given the limited scope of XHTML-Print and the desire for maximum
    interoperability, I would recommend that we stick with UTF-8 as the
    only requirement so that applications that send XHTML-Print data have
    to use UTF-8 and manage whatever perversion of UTF-16 they use
    internally themselves... 

    -- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Sep 03 2003 - 10:26:04 EDT