Menu spec: .desktop filename encoding issue

Daniel Veillard veillard at redhat.com
Wed Jul 20 19:12:21 EEST 2005


On Wed, Jul 20, 2005 at 05:03:09PM +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 	If a .desktop filename is encoded using some unknown charset[1] then
> the filename is essentially junk (i.e. you can't reliably convert it to
> a known encoding).

   XML solved that problem the following way:
     - the file has an encoding (with UTF-8 and UTF-16 being the 
       only default encoding, i.e. guessed/assumed if not indicated
       in the instance)
     - unknown encoding are fatal error the file can't be read
     - if the file does not follow that encoding it's a fatal error
       the file cannot be read
    - never ever depend on a locale for processing 

IMHO XML solved the problem for good that way. Making encoding errors 
fatal also ensured that problems are detected immediately, not on the
client in the majority of the cases.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard at redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/



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