[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] "Interoperability is getting better" ... What does that mean?
Hi Folks, Several people have stated: Interoperability, on the whole, does seem to be getting better. In the context of our discussion on character encoding, what does that mean? I will take a stab at defining what it means: Interoperability means that you and I interpret (decode) the bytes in the XML file in the same way. Example: I create an XML file and I encode all the characters in it using UTF-8. Here is a graphical depiction (i.e., glyphs) of the bytes that I send to you: <Name>López</Name> You receive my XML document but you interpret the bytes as iso-8859-1. Oops! Now the trouble begins. In UTF-8 the ó is a graphical depiction of the LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH ACUTE character and it is encoded inside the computer using these two bytes: C3 B3 But in iso-8859-1 the two bytes C3 B3 is the encoding of two characters: C3 is the encoding of the à character B3 is the encoding of the ³ character Thus, you interpret the XML as: <Name>López</Name> We are interpreting the same XML document (i.e., the same set of bytes) differently. Interoperability has failed. So, when we say: Interoperability is getting better. we mean that the number of occurrences of senders and receivers interpreting the bytes in an XML document is decreasing. Is that correct? /Roger
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