[I18n-sig] Re: [XML-SIG] Character encodings and expat

[Martin v. Loewis]

> I don't use Tcl, Java or X11 and don't know what ICU
> is, but I do use Python on several platforms and would
> want to know that the encodings library worked
> identically on all platforms - i.e. if there are bugs
> in the codecs, they are consistent and can be fixed
> consistently.  I think this issue was pretty much settled
> in MAL's original i18n proposal.

I sense a certain "reinvent the wheel" attitude here. Why do you
assume that the codecs developed by somebody else will have bugs?

While the "we know how character sets work" approach provides
consistency across platforms, it doesn't provide consistency between
applications on a single platform. I believe most users are more
interested in that - they install some codec tables on their system,
and then all applications recognize these codecs, whether written in C
or Python.

Regards,
Martin