Code Page - Criticism

Criticism

Many older character encodings, except Unicode, suffer from several problems.

  1. Some code page vendors insufficiently document the meaning of all code point values. This decreases the reliability of handling textual data through various computer systems consistently.
  2. Some vendors add proprietary extensions to some code pages to add or change certain code point values. For example, byte \x5C in Shift JIS can represent either a back slash or a yen currency symbol depending on the platform.
  3. In order to support several languages in a program that does not use Unicode, the code page used for each string/document needs to be stored.

Due to Unicode's extensive documentation, vast repertoire of characters and stability policy of characters, these problems are rarely a concern for Unicode.

Applications may also mislabel text in Windows-1252 as ISO-8859-1. Fortunately, the only difference between these code pages is that the code point values used by ISO-8859-1 for control characters are instead used as additional printable characters in Windows-1252. Since control characters have no function in HTML, web browsers tend to use Windows-1252 rather than ISO-8859-1.

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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    “I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
    —Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    “Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
    —Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)

    “I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
    —Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)