Re: Requesting a revision of RFC3023

Francois Yergeau scripsit:

> In this respect, yes.  All programming languages should provide for charset
> identification of their source files.  Alas, none do, AFAIK.

I almost, but not quite, entirely disagree with this position.

Rather than having thousands of ad hoc mechanisms for encoding declarations
in each of the thousands of text formats now extant, file systems should have
a convenient mechanism for recording the encoding of each file, and character
processing libraries should have convenient reading and writing operations that
do the necessary conversions.  Otherwise, generic text-processing tools become
impossible, because each tool has to have a vast library that understands the
mechanics of the encoding declaration specific to the format it is trying to
read.  That way madness lies.

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