XML for module descriptor

[Debasish Ray Chawdhuri]

1. How do your java files specify encoding? Similarly we might try to
externally specify encoding in case it is not our default UTF-8 with some
form of -encoding option.

2. JSON can specify encoding if we modify the parser a little. I guess we
would have to find something with a license compatible with GPL. We can
modify it to read an optional first line { "encoding":"UTF-8",  if default
encoding is not used. But I still would prefer the external option being
passed to java compiler and java runtime.

3. The reason people do not complain about MANIFEST.MF being always in
UTF-8 is that people hardly ever try to have class names and package names
in non-ASCII characters, the encoding support for java files in mainly for
string literals.

It certainly does not make sense to have a complex parser like XML parser
just because we want to support different encoding and we want the class
names, package names and module names in non-ASCII characters.

-- 
Debasish Ray Chawdhuri
<http://www.geekyarticles.com/>