Standards are less useful in the presence of fools

13 December 2006 — in FAIL, Web, uboot.com

Standards are quite useless if fools do not adhere to them; unfortunately fools are everywhere. Therefore, one could almost conclude that standards are quite useless.

Specifically I implemented a data transfer protocol based on GET requests, and as specified in RFC 3986 “Uniform Resource Identifier” section 2.5.

… the data should first be encoded as octets according to the UTF-8 character encoding [STD63]; then …. should be percent-encoded. For example, … the character LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE would be represented as “%C3%80” ….

However, they required me to send data Latin-1 encoded, rather than UTF-8 as according to the standard. I explained to them that this was wrong, that the character set is not a choice that is theirs to make. They simply replied:

We are sending with ISO-8859-1(Latin-1).

What can I do?

Refuse to work with this company? (But management want me to “find a solution”)
Change my code to be non-standards compliant?

Obviously what I did was the second, but it felt so wrong.

P.S. I recently created a nerdy privacy-respecting tool called When Will I Run Out Of Money? It's available for free if you want to check it out.