[Python-Dev] Bytes path support (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Aug 26 04:47:24 CEST 2014

Isaac Morland writes:

I like your way of putting this - "straight face" indeed. The third option really is a hack to allow working around nonsensical situations (and even the META tag is pretty questionable). All this complexity because people can't be bothered to do things properly.

At least in Japan and Russia, doing things "properly" in your sense in heterogenous distributed systems is really hard, requiring use of rather fragile encoding detection heuristics that break at the slightest whiff of encodings that are unusual in the particular locale, and in Japan requiring equally fragile transcoding programs that break on vendor charset variations. The META "charset" attribute is useful in those contexts, and the "charset" attribute for external elements may have been useful in the past as well, although I've never needed it.

I agree that an environment where "charset" attributes on META and other elements are needed kinda sucks, but the prerequisite for "doing things properly" is basically Unicode[1], and that just wasn't going to happen until at least the 1990s. To make the transition in less than several decades would have required a degree of monopoly in software production that I shudder to contemplate. Even today there are programmers around the world grumbling about having to deal with the Unicode coded character set.

Footnotes: [1] More precisely, a universal coded character set. TRON code or MULE code would have done (but yuck!) ISO 2022 won't do!

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