XML i18n

Wednesday, August 18th, 2004

Uche Ogbuji (remember that name. If you ever run into anything having to do with XML you’ll see his name popping up everywhere) writes on his O’Reilly developers weblog:

“I think the most pervasive problem in XML adoption is ingorance and even wilful sabotage of the international foundation on which XML is built. In several recent incidents, both in my consulting work and in my OSS/community work I have come across systems that ignore or break XML’s Unicode character model.
I’ve almost grown tired of saying it, but it is worth saying until I’ve worked through my very last nerve: the single most important aspect of XML is its character model. Ditch XML and use something else before you mess with that. A tremendous amount of damage is done by people who can’t see past the pointy brackets as the point of XML.”

Then he points us to this article, which is quite an interesting read. I haven’t learned anything new that can be applied by me straight away, but the article is a nice introduction into internationalisation (i18n) nonetheless.

A reintroduction to XML with an emphasis on character encoding