[Python-ideas] Support WHATWG versions of legacy encodings

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Thu Jan 11 04:14:59 EST 2018


On 11.01.2018 10:01, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 7:58 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Would it be viable to have them in the stdlib for decoding only? To
> have them simply not work for encoding?

That would be possible and resolve the above issues I have with
the encodings.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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