From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan 9 (in)security From: David Gordon Hogan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20010702181031.EECB9199E1@mail.cse.psu.edu> Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 14:10:29 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: c2ed7774-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 >>At 256 bits per character I think xml is an excellent idea. > >Perpetuating the joke, I know, but I have a question. > >If one is going to represent the character set using XML, then >how does one represent the characters which make up the XML? > >Oh, I know, using 7 bit ASCII? > >Wouldn't it be so much easier if we were still using the PDP-10, >which had variable size bytes, up to 36 bits in size? Obviously we should not set a fixed character size, like 256 bits, but migrate to a variable length encoding, where the first 16 bits describes the length of the character. HTH. HAND.