On Friday, March 22, 2002, at 01:13 , Mark Davis wrote:
> There might be a wee bit more Unicode around in Japan than people
> realize. Anyone using MS Office or Windows NT/2000/XP is using Unicode
> under the hood; the same is true for others. Many servers keep Unicode
> on the back-end (that way they can mix data from different languages
> without loss), and then serve up the data in whatever code pages the
> browser is configured for. Etc.
And don't forget MacOS after 8.1; Even its file system is in
Unicode. To get the most out of new HFS+, you need MacOS X, however.
But so long as a given encoding is under the hood, it doesn't matter
much. Mule has been using a funky internal encodings for a long time
and no one complains.
Its true success or failure should be judged as external encodings.
As for that, Unicode is yet to be successful, even compared to ISO-2022
variants. Which is sad for me because UTF-8 is one of few Unicode
things I love. (I know many Japanese complain for each Kanji taking up
3 bytes instead of two but data sizes I don't care much; You can always
compress with gzip or bzip and BASE64 and others are already bloating
TCP streams....)
Dan the Author of Encode and MacOSX::File
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Mar 21 2002 - 12:27:24 EST