This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 56 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 56 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
Alex Shinn wrote:
At Sat, 18 Sep 2004 09:31:02 -0700, Per Bothner wrote:* Most file formats that mix text and binary i/o do *not* handle general strings: often they only support whatever character encoding the "creative" engineers are most familiar with.I think relatively few formats assume a single encoding. Either they tend to treat strings agnostically as a sequence of bytes (leaving encoding interpretation up to the programmer),
Which means they only handle a single encoding.
HTTP, MIME, and most internet standards ...
HTTP is net work protocol, not a file encoding. MIME is primarily a network protocol, though it also ends up being use for email storage. Network people tend to be more aware of internationalization issues - they have to be. I suspect widely use file formats tend to handle internationalized text, since at least somebody involved with specifyin them will have a basic understanding og internationalization. Home-grown file formats are I suspect more likely to be single-format. In any case this is a side issue, of course. -- --Per Bothner per@xxxxxxxxxxx http://per.bothner.com/