From: Jon Hanna (jon@hackcraft.net)
Date: Thu May 06 2004 - 03:57:55 CDT
There were a lot of costs and lost productivity that resulted
> from local users using custom 8-bit encodings. We used to do it because
> there was no alternative. Now there is an alternative, however, and
> Unicode is definitely the better choice for the local users, because
> they will be able to obtain fonts & software that support their language
> far more readily, and they become much less dependent on IT specialists
> to help them (a) implement support for their language and (b) help them
> work around the myriad issues they encounter when trying to get software
> that has no awareness of a custom encoding to do what they want.
If you think of the users of an encoding as a social network then we would
expect something like Metcalf's or Reed's law to affect it. The bigger the
network the better off they'll be. Unicode has the biggest network.
-- Jon Hanna <http://www.hackcraft.net/> "…it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people." - jargon.txt
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