Re: 23.0.60; [nxml] BOM and utf-8

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> In any case, maintaining faithfulness of representation is simply not
> possible, as you point out

With some coding systems.  But the latin-* and utf-* can maintain the
binary stream since their coding is required to be canonical in the
standard.  Everything that is not canonical (including the byte
sequences for encoding out-of-line octets) is encoded as out-of-line
octets as far as I understand.

> (safe-character-sets or whatever you call your analog to latin-unity
> being another case).  It's also not at all obvious that that is a very
> useful requirement when dealing with a character-oriented standard
> like Unicode or XML, since you can expect many applications to
> canonicalize the text "behind your back".

That's not an issue.  But for example, you can use Emacs to load some
library in the coding its texts are encoded in, search and edit a string
in overwrite mode (as long as it does not get longer) and save again,
and the result will usually work.

Also you can load, edit and save a text file in colloborative
environments, and the diffs/patches will be just in the edited areas
(this will supposedly work better with Emacs-23 than Emacs-22).  Those
are quite important features.

> Users should get used to it, and we should document how to force Emacs
> to error rather than do anything behind your back for those who need
> binary faithfulness rather than text faithfulness.

Since binary faithfulness implies text faithfulness, there is no reason
not to the right thing instead of erroring out.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum