Re: [xml] encoding tutorial draft

[Igor Zlatkovic <igor stud fh-frankfurt de>]

> alright, alright. Let's stress the necessity of conversion. But I still
> believe that the majority of readers of the tutorial, will only need the
> hint and know what this is all about. I would rather point people not
> familar with the idea of encoding to some different source of information

Hey, my yesterday's text was not meant to be included in any tutorial. It 
was just an answer to John's question if I see anything in his code sample I 
would do differently.

> and help the rest to a fast start using libxml. However, since I am not
> going to write the tutorial (nobody would like it anyway :), everything is
> fine with me!!

I know that :-) The writer's opinion is more or less irrelevant for the 
overall quality of any written text. The reader's opinion is what counts.

> Maybe I am too biased, though. I just started programming C but am quite
> familar with Java, XML, MIME, ...

Of course you are biased, everyone is. It takes a training and an expirience 
to remove that bias.

> I quickly scanned through the tutorials before my first try on libxml and
> loved it being so short :)

The length is another issue, I believe we are misunderstanding each other 
here. There is a tutorial, a manual (in the sense of handbook) and a 
reference manual. These are three different things. Beginners need a 
tutorial. Expirienced programmers who start using libxml need a manual. 
Beginners understand little from a manual and expirienced programmers are 
too bored with a tutorial.

Tutorials target beginners and have the best effect when the beginner also 
has a person to guide her through (a tutor). What I mean by manual is 
appearantly what we are talking about and in that case, you are right, my 
text is inadequate.

> But thats just my personal perception ;) I am also very pleased with reading
> libxmls source because I am learning this way.

Sure, but source code is not exactly something you can read as you would 
read a book. It gives a lot of information, true, but bears the danger to 
discover basic and important things late.

I would personally not know that the internal format is UTF-8 just by 
reading the code bits. I would find that out as soon as I would start a 
debugging session wondering why "äöü" is being misinterpreted (which is 
precisely the way I did it :-)).

Ciao
Igor