From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Mon Dec 01 2003 - 11:30:09 EST
On a somewhat related topic, the other day I got onto a Windows XP
system and took a look at the Help item for "Unicode." You might
remember that I chided Microsoft for its definition of "Unicode" in
Windows 2000 Help, where Unicode was described as a "16-bit standard"
that was "developed between 1988 and 1991," implying that the work was
finished. Even at the time Windows 2000 was being developed, there was
quite a bit of room for improvement in this definition.
So I was pleased to see a much better definition in Windows XP,
including separate descriptions of UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. IIRC,
there was some acknowledgement of the existence of supplementary
characters. There is still a minor problem -- the abbreviation "UCS" is
expanded to "Unicode Character System" instead of "Universal Character
Set" -- but this is not going to mislead users greatly.
I believe the definitions found in Windows Help are important because
many users will go to them first. Awareness and understanding of
Unicode among ordinary users is still not what it should be. Many still
believe in automatic doubling of file sizes, for example.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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