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Daniel Veillard43d3f612001-11-10 11:57:23 +0000[diff] [blame]1<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">
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13<title>Encodings support</title>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]14</head>
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21<h1>The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
22<h2>Encodings support</h2>
23</td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td>
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Daniel Veillard8acca112002-01-21 09:52:27 +0000[diff] [blame]29<tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]30<li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li>
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Daniel Veillard3bf65be2002-01-23 12:36:34 +0000[diff] [blame]62<tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>API Indexes</b></center></td></tr>
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Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]72<tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>Related links</b></center></td></tr>
Daniel Veillard8acca112002-01-21 09:52:27 +0000[diff] [blame]73<tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]74<li><a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">Mail archive</a></li>
75<li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">XSLT libxslt</a></li>
Daniel Veillard4a859202002-01-08 11:49:22 +0000[diff] [blame]76<li><a href="http://phd.cs.unibo.it/gdome2/">DOM gdome2</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]77<li><a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">FTP</a></li>
78<li><a href="http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/">Windows binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillarddb9dfd92001-11-26 17:25:02 +0000[diff] [blame]79<li><a href="http://garypennington.net/libxml2/">Solaris binaries</a></li>
Daniel Veillardc6271d22001-10-27 07:50:58 +0000[diff] [blame]80<li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml">Bug Tracker</a></li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]81</ul></td></tr>
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Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]85<p>Table of Content:</p>
86<ol>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]87<li><a href="encoding.html#What">What does internationalization support
88 mean ?</a></li>
89<li><a href="encoding.html#internal">The internal encoding, how and
90 why</a></li>
91<li><a href="encoding.html#implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></li>
92<li><a href="encoding.html#Default">Default supported encodings</a></li>
93<li><a href="encoding.html#extend">How to extend the existing
94 support</a></li>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]95</ol>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]96<h3><a name="What">What does internationalization support mean ?</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]97<p>XML was designed from the start to allow the support of any character set
98by using Unicode. Any conformant XML parser has to support the UTF-8 and
99UTF-16 default encodings which can both express the full unicode ranges. UTF8
100is a variable length encoding whose greatest point are to resuse the same
101emcoding for ASCII and to save space for Western encodings, but it is a bit
102more complex to handle in practice. UTF-16 use 2 bytes per characters (and
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]103sometimes combines two pairs), it makes implementation easier, but looks a
104bit overkill for Western languages encoding. Moreover the XML specification
105allows document to be encoded in other encodings at the condition that they
106are clearly labelled as such. For example the following is a wellformed XML
Daniel Veillard0d6b1702000-08-22 23:52:16 +0000[diff] [blame]107document encoded in ISO-8859 1 and using accentuated letter that we French
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]108likes for both markup and content:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]109<pre>&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;ISO-8859-1&quot;?&gt;
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]110&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillard0d6b1702000-08-22 23:52:16 +0000[diff] [blame]111<p>Having internationalization support in libxml means the foolowing:</p>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]112<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]113<li>the document is properly parsed</li>
114<li>informations about it's encoding are saved</li>
115<li>it can be modified</li>
116<li>it can be saved in its original encoding</li>
117<li>it can also be saved in another encoding supported by libxml (for
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]118 example straight UTF8 or even an ASCII form)</li>
119</ul>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]120<p>Another very important point is that the whole libxml API, with the
121exception of a few routines to read with a specific encoding or save to a
122specific encoding, is completely agnostic about the original encoding of the
123document.</p>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]124<p>It should be noted too that the HTML parser embedded in libxml now obbey
125the same rules too, the following document will be (as of 2.2.2) handled in
126an internationalized fashion by libxml too:</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]127<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC &quot;-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN&quot;
128 &quot;http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd&quot;&gt;
129&lt;html lang=&quot;fr&quot;&gt;
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]130&lt;head&gt;
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]131 &lt;META HTTP-EQUIV=&quot;Content-Type&quot; CONTENT=&quot;text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1&quot;&gt;
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]132&lt;/head&gt;
133&lt;body&gt;
134&lt;p&gt;W3C crée des standards pour le Web.&lt;/body&gt;
135&lt;/html&gt;</pre>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]136<h3><a name="internal">The internal encoding, how and why</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]137<p>One of the core decision was to force all documents to be converted to a
138default internal encoding, and that encoding to be UTF-8, here are the
139rationale for those choices:</p>
140<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]141<li>keeping the native encoding in the internal form would force the libxml
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]142 users (or the code associated) to be fully aware of the encoding of the
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]143 original document, for examples when adding a text node to a document,
144 the content would have to be provided in the document encoding, i.e. the
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]145 client code would have to check it before hand, make sure it's conformant
146 to the encoding, etc ... Very hard in practice, though in some specific
147 cases this may make sense.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]148<li>the second decision was which encoding. From the XML spec only UTF8 and
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]149 UTF16 really makes sense as being the two only encodings for which there
150 is amndatory support. UCS-4 (32 bits fixed size encoding) could be
151 considered an intelligent choice too since it's a direct Unicode mapping
152 support. I selected UTF-8 on the basis of efficiency and compatibility
153 with surrounding software:
154 <ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]155<li>UTF-8 while a bit more complex to convert from/to (i.e. slightly
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]156 more costly to import and export CPU wise) is also far more compact
157 than UTF-16 (and UCS-4) for a majority of the documents I see it used
158 for right now (RPM RDF catalogs, advogato data, various configuration
159 file formats, etc.) and the key point for today's computer
160 architecture is efficient uses of caches. If one nearly double the
161 memory requirement to store the same amount of data, this will trash
162 caches (main memory/external caches/internal caches) and my take is
163 that this harms the system far more than the CPU requirements needed
164 for the conversion to UTF-8</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]165<li>Most of libxml version 1 users were using it with straight ASCII
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]166 most of the time, doing the conversion with an internal encoding
167 requiring all their code to be rewritten was a serious show-stopper
168 for using UTF-16 or UCS-4.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]169<li>UTF-8 is being used as the de-facto internal encoding standard for
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]170 related code like the <a href="http://www.pango.org/">pango</a>
171 upcoming Gnome text widget, and a lot of Unix code (yep another place
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]172 where Unix programmer base takes a different approach from Microsoft
173 - they are using UTF-16)</li>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]174</ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]175</li>
176</ul>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]177<p>What does this mean in practice for the libxml user:</p>
178<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]179<li>xmlChar, the libxml data type is a byte, those bytes must be assembled
180 as UTF-8 valid strings. The proper way to terminate an xmlChar * string
181 is simply to append 0 byte, as usual.</li>
182<li>One just need to make sure that when using chars outside the ASCII set,
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]183 the values has been properly converted to UTF-8</li>
184</ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]185<h3><a name="implemente">How is it implemented ?</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]186<p>Let's describe how all this works within libxml, basically the I18N
187(internationalization) support get triggered only during I/O operation, i.e.
188when reading a document or saving one. Let's look first at the reading
189sequence:</p>
190<ol>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]191<li>when a document is processed, we usually don't know the encoding, a
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]192 simple heuristic allows to detect UTF-18 and UCS-4 from whose where the
193 ASCII range (0-0x7F) maps with ASCII</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]194<li>the xml declaration if available is parsed, including the encoding
195 declaration. At that point, if the autodetected encoding is different
196 from the one declared a call to xmlSwitchEncoding() is issued.</li>
197<li>If there is no encoding declaration, then the input has to be in either
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]198 UTF-8 or UTF-16, if it is not then at some point when processing the
199 input, the converter/checker of UTF-8 form will raise an encoding error.
200 You may end-up with a garbled document, or no document at all ! Example:
201 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err.xml
202err.xml:1: error: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
203&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
204 ^
205err.xml:1: error: Bytes: 0xE8 0x73 0x3E 0x6C
206&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
207 ^</pre>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]208</li>
209<li>xmlSwitchEncoding() does an encoding name lookup, canonalize it, and
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]210 then search the default registered encoding converters for that encoding.
211 If it's not within the default set and iconv() support has been compiled
212 it, it will ask iconv for such an encoder. If this fails then the parser
213 will report an error and stops processing:
214 <pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint err2.xml
215err2.xml:1: error: Unsupported encoding UnsupportedEnc
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]216&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UnsupportedEnc&quot;?&gt;
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]217 ^</pre>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]218</li>
219<li>From that point the encoder process progressingly the input (it is
220 plugged as a front-end to the I/O module) for that entity. It captures
221 and convert on-the-fly the document to be parsed to UTF-8. The parser
222 itself just does UTF-8 checking of this input and process it
223 transparently. The only difference is that the encoding information has
224 been added to the parsing context (more precisely to the input
225 corresponding to this entity).</li>
226<li>The result (when using DOM) is an internal form completely in UTF-8
227 with just an encoding information on the document node.</li>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]228</ol>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]229<p>Ok then what's happen when saving the document (assuming you
230colllected/built an xmlDoc DOM like structure) ? It depends on the function
231called, xmlSaveFile() will just try to save in the original encoding, while
232xmlSaveFileTo() and xmlSaveFileEnc() can optionally save to a given
233encoding:</p>
234<ol>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]235<li>if no encoding is given, libxml will look for an encoding value
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]236 associated to the document and if it exists will try to save to that
237 encoding,
238 <p>otherwise everything is written in the internal form, i.e. UTF-8</p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]239</li>
240<li>so if an encoding was specified, either at the API level or on the
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]241 document, libxml will again canonalize the encoding name, lookup for a
242 converter in the registered set or through iconv. If not found the
243 function will return an error code</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]244<li>the converter is placed before the I/O buffer layer, as another kind of
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]245 buffer, then libxml will simply push the UTF-8 serialization to through
246 that buffer, which will then progressively be converted and pushed onto
247 the I/O layer.</li>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]248<li>It is possible that the converter code fails on some input, for example
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]249 trying to push an UTF-8 encoded chinese character through the UTF-8 to
Daniel Veillard0d6b1702000-08-22 23:52:16 +0000[diff] [blame]250 ISO-8859-1 converter won't work. Since the encoders are progressive they
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]251 will just report the error and the number of bytes converted, at that
252 point libxml will decode the offending character, remove it from the
253 buffer and replace it with the associated charRef encoding &amp;#123; and
254 resume the convertion. This guarante that any document will be saved
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]255 without losses (except for markup names where this is not legal, this is
256 a problem in the current version, in pactice avoid using non-ascci
257 characters for tags or attributes names @@). A special &quot;ascii&quot; encoding
Daniel Veillard0d6b1702000-08-22 23:52:16 +0000[diff] [blame]258 name is used to save documents to a pure ascii form can be used when
259 portability is really crucial</li>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]260</ol>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]261<p>Here is a few examples based on the same test document:</p>
262<pre>~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint isolat1
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]263&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;ISO-8859-1&quot;?&gt;
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]264&lt;très&gt;là&lt;/très&gt;
265~/XML -&gt; ./xmllint --encode UTF-8 isolat1
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]266&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]267&lt;très&gt;là  &lt;/très&gt;
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]268~/XML -&gt; </pre>
Daniel Veillard0d6b1702000-08-22 23:52:16 +0000[diff] [blame]269<p>The same processing is applied (and reuse most of the code) for HTML I18N
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]270processing. Looking up and modifying the content encoding is a bit more
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]271difficult since it is located in a &lt;meta&gt; tag under the &lt;head&gt;,
272so a couple of functions htmlGetMetaEncoding() and htmlSetMetaEncoding() have
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]273been provided. The parser also attempts to switch encoding on the fly when
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]274detecting such a tag on input. Except for that the processing is the same
275(and again reuses the same code).</p>
276<h3><a name="Default">Default supported encodings</a></h3>
277<p>libxml has a set of default converters for the following encodings
278(located in encoding.c):</p>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]279<ol>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]280<li>UTF-8 is supported by default (null handlers)</li>
281<li>UTF-16, both little and big endian</li>
282<li>ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covering most western languages</li>
283<li>ASCII, useful mostly for saving</li>
284<li>HTML, a specific handler for the conversion of UTF-8 to ASCII with HTML
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]285 predefined entities like &amp;copy; for the Copyright sign.</li>
286</ol>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]287<p>More over when compiled on an Unix platfor with iconv support the full set
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]288of encodings supported by iconv can be instantly be used by libxml. On a
289linux machine with glibc-2.1 the list of supported encodings and aliases fill
2903 full pages, and include UCS-4, the full set of ISO-Latin encodings, and the
291various Japanese ones.</p>
292<h4>Encoding aliases</h4>
293<p>From 2.2.3, libxml has support to register encoding names aliases. The
294goal is to be able to parse document whose encoding is supported but where
295the name differs (for example from the default set of names accepted by
296iconv). The following functions allow to register and handle new aliases for
297existing encodings. Once registered libxml will automatically lookup the
298aliases when handling a document:</p>
Daniel Veillard088f4282000-08-25 23:46:50 +0000[diff] [blame]299<ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]300<li>int xmlAddEncodingAlias(const char *name, const char *alias);</li>
301<li>int xmlDelEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
302<li>const char * xmlGetEncodingAlias(const char *alias);</li>
303<li>void xmlCleanupEncodingAliases(void);</li>
Daniel Veillard088f4282000-08-25 23:46:50 +0000[diff] [blame]304</ul>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]305<h3><a name="extend">How to extend the existing support</a></h3>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]306<p>Well adding support for new encoding, or overriding one of the encoders
307(assuming it is buggy) should not be hard, just write an input and output
308conversion routines to/from UTF-8, and register them using
309xmlNewCharEncodingHandler(name, xxxToUTF8, UTF8Toxxx), and they will be
310called automatically if the parser(s) encounter such an encoding name
311(register it uppercase, this will help). The description of the encoders,
312their arguments and expected return values are described in the encoding.h
313header.</p>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]314<p>A quick note on the topic of subverting the parser to use a different
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]315internal encoding than UTF-8, in some case people will absolutely want to
316keep the internal encoding different, I think it's still possible (but the
317encoding must be compliant with ASCII on the same subrange) though I didn't
318tried it. The key is to override the default conversion routines (by
319registering null encoders/decoders for your charsets), and bypass the UTF-8
320checking of the parser by setting the parser context charset
321(ctxt-&gt;charset) to something different than XML_CHAR_ENCODING_UTF8, but
322there is no guarantee taht this will work. You may also have some troubles
323saving back.</p>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]324<p>Basically proper I18N support is important, this requires at least
325libxml-2.0.0, but a lot of features and corrections are really available only
326starting 2.2.</p>
Daniel Veillard3f4c40f2002-02-13 09:19:28 +0000[diff] [blame^]327<p><a href="bugs.html">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
Daniel Veillardb8cfbd12001-10-25 10:53:28 +0000[diff] [blame]328</td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td>
329</tr></table></td></tr></table>
Daniel Veillardbe40c8b2000-07-14 12:10:59 +0000[diff] [blame]330</body>
331</html>