Re: [Gnu-arch-users] How does arch/tla handle encodings?

[Jan Hudec]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 21:38:06 +0300, Marcus Sundman wrote:
> On Friday 27 August 2004 21:23, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 08:20:00PM +0300, Marcus Sundman wrote:
> > > On Friday 27 August 2004 19:52, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > > > On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 06:50:23PM +0200, Vaclav Haisman wrote:
> > > > > File's encoding is imho metadata as much as permisions are.
> > > >
> > > > It's not. Encoding is data.
> > >
> > > Oh, get a clue. And a dictionary. The encoding info is data about the
> > > data that is the content of the file. "Data about data" is called
> > > "metadata". "Encoding" is an attribute of the file, just as "filename"
> > > and "permissions" are.
> >
> > And I repeat: encoding is data.
> 
> Yes, but it's also metadata. You said it isn't, but it is. Don't pretend to 
> be more stupid than you are.

It is **NOT** metadata in the sense of filename, permissions, timestamp,
ie. file attributes. It is metadata in the general sense "data about
data".

So while *calling* it metadata is ok, *treating* it as file attributes
is not. The encoding is needed to understand the file, so it better be
deduced from it's contents. The attributes do not bind that tighlty and
they can be lost at any moment. Especially since applications don't know
how to handle them.

After all, that's what the byte-order-mark is for. In most editors, the
sequence 0xfe 0xff indicates utf-16be, 0xff 0xfe indicates utf-16le and
0xef 0xbb 0xbf indicates utf-8 encoding. Unfortunately, there is no
standard for other encodings.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec 
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