Unicode Encoding Formats: A Devil In Disguise?
Debmalya Biswas - InfoSys Technologies
Limited
| Intended Audience: |
Managers, Software Engineers, Systems Analysts, Content
Developers, Technical Writers |
| Session Level: |
Intermediate |
Statement Of Purpose:Unicode.org defines Unicode as "Unicode provides a unique number
for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what
the program, no matter what the language". While Unicode does what
it says if you consider a Platform (Operating System) or a Language
(Software l! an! guage) as an independent entity, but the moment
you start talking about implementing international character
support across languages and platforms via Unicode, you are
entering dangerous territory. The reason being the various Unicode
encoding formats (UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, UCS-2, UCS-4 etc)
used by different languages/platforms. In Unicode terminology, the numbers assigned to each character
is called code point. Since encoding formats determine how a code
point is represented at the bit level, whenever Unicode data is
passed from one language/platform to another language/platform
using a different encoding format, the situation becomse similar to
as was prevalent before Unicode came into being (the problem of
different charsets being used for different language characters).
The paper stresses the need for a better solution to the
interoperability woes than the measly format conversion routines
provided (or you can say not provided) by different languages/
platforms. Paper Description:This paper attempts to highlight the problems/issues faced by
software developers while implementing an I18N solution, which
spans across multiple platforms/languages by taking a few real life
interoperability examples (such as between Java/C++, HTML/ASP/JSP,
SQL Server/ODBC/JDBC). It also analyzes the solutions or answers
provided by some of these languages/platforms to overcome these
issues. Conclusion:Although the various encoding formats are necessary given the
various limitations and requirements of different
languages/platforms, but the fact remains that the presence of
these is a serious hindrance when it comes to interoperability
between languages/platforms. Prerequisite:A basic understanding of Software Internationlaization as well
as aware of Unicode Terminology. |
