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.topic 50000
This chapter contains useful background information on the technical aspects of XMLSPY 5. If you run across a technical term in the remainder of this help system you may occasionally find a link to some of the background materials provided here.
.topic 54000
Unicode is the new 16-bit character-set standard defined by the Unicode Consortium that provides a unique number for every character,
no matter what the platform,
no matter what the program,
no matter what the language.
Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English, no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.
These encoding systems used to conflict with one another. That is, two encodings used the same number for two different characters, or different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs the risk of corruption.
Unicode is changing all that!
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, and no matter what the language. The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Base and many others.
Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, are among the most significant recent global software technology trends.
Incorporating Unicode into client-server or multi-tiered applications and web sites offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets. Unicode enables a single software product or a single web site to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. It allows data to be transported through many different systems without corruption.
Even though XML is clearly defined to be based on the Unicode standard, XMLSPY 5 is still one of the few XML development tools that fully implements Unicode!
.topic 54002
These Windows versions do not include full Unicode capabilities on the operating system layer. Instead support for non-roman writing-systems is provided through so-called code-pages that contain all the required characters mapped to either the available byte-values in the range of 0x80 to 0xFF (in case of single-byte systems, such as Cyrillic or Hebrew) or as double-byte values, where the first most significant bit of the first byte is typically used to indicate that this is a so-called "wide character" (in case of CJK writing-systems).
We therefore provider a special Windows 98/ME version of XMLSPY 5 that is automatically installed whenever you are using the Setup program on these operating systems. This version of XMLSPY 5 supports the following code-pages for viewing and editing XML documents (for excellent background information about code-pages please refer to http://czyborra.com/charsets/codepages.html):
Code-page Equivalent XML Encoding
1252 ISO-8859-1 (Western, Latin-1)
1250 ISO-8859-2 (Eastern Europe, Latin-2)
1251 ISO-8859-5 (Cyrillic)
1253 ISO-8859-7 (Greek)
1254 ISO-8859-9 (Turkish)
1255 ISO-8859-8 (Hebrew)
1256 ISO-8859-6 (Arabic)
874 ISO-8859-11/TIS-620 (Thai)
932 Shift-JIS (Japanese)
936 GB2312 (Chinese)
949 EUC-KR (Korean)
950 Big5 (Taiwanese)
Whenever you open an XML file, XMLSPY 5 detects the character-set encoding used in that file, expands the file to an internal full Unicode representation and then transforms the document to a code-page supported by Windows 98 in order to enable viewing and editing of the document.
In most cases this process will be entirely automatic, as the available ISO-8895-x encodings as well as some of the CJK encodings often correspond with a certain code-page. However, if you open a Unicode encoded file (e.g. UTF-8 or UTF-16) XMLSPY 5 will be unable to determine which code-page to use and will thus bring up a dialog box that asks you to specify a code-page to be used for editing.
In order to correctly view and edit a Unicode file under Windows 98/ME it is extremely important that you use this dialog box to:
a) choose the correct code-page that includes all characters contained in the file and
b) later select a font and script from the settings dialog box that also supports the same code-page.
If the file contains any characters that are not available in the selected code-page, the user will receive an error message including a detailed list of offending characters before they will be replaced by a '_' (underscore).
We therefore highly recommend using only the Windows NT/2000 version of XMLSPY 5 for editing XML files that make full use of Unicode!
