[Python-ideas] Support WHATWG versions of legacy encodings

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 11.01.2018 01:22, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> On 11 January 2018 at 05:04, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>> For the stdlib, I think we should stick to standards and
>> not go for spreading non-standard ones.
>>
>> So -1 on adding WHATWG encodings to the stdlib.
> 
> We already support HTML5 in the standard library, and saying "We'll
> accept WHATWG's definition of HTML, but not their associated text
> encodings" seems like a strange place to draw a line when it comes to
> standards support.

There's a problem with these encodings: they are mostly meant
for decoding (broken) data, but as soon as we have them in the stdlib,
people will also start using them for encoding data, producing more
corrupted data.

Do you really things it's a good idea to support this natively
in Python ?

The other problem is that WHATWG considers its documents "living
standards", i.e. they are subject to change and don't come with
a version number (apart from a date).

This makes sense when you look at their mostly decoding-only
nature, but, again for encoding, creates an interoperability problem.

> I do think your observation constitutes a compelling reason to leave
> the existing codecs alone though, and treat the web codecs as a
> distinct set of mappings. Given that, I think Rob's original
> suggestion of using "web-1252" et al is a good one.
> 
> We can also separate them out in the documentation, such that we have
> three tables:
> 
> * https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#standard-encodings
> (Unicode Consortium)
> * https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#python-specific-encodings
> (python-dev/PSF)
> * a new table for WHATWG encodings
> 
> Cheers,
> Nick.
> 

-- 
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eGenix.com

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