Ron Murray from Microsoft wrote:

I really enjoyed the 9th Unicode Conference.

I believe the most striking aspect of the conference was the number of product demonstrations. In previous conferences most of the talks centered around how people were planning to support Unicode in their operating system or in their development environment. And Microsoft with our NT and Win 95 implementations of Unicode was the exception in those days.

At this conference we saw a bunch of Unicode centric products from MS, Netscape, Accent, Alis, Gamma, and others. Clearly the Internet tidal wave is driving the move toward Unicode. Issues which looked to be "future" problems now have immediate and powerful impacts thanks to the fluid transnational communication available on the Internet.

That Internet focus showed very clearly in the exhibit area. It was also evident in the large crowds for the talk which I gave about Internet Explorer 3.0 and the talk which Frank Yu-Fong Tang gave about Netscape Navigator 3.0. It also showed in the steady demand for additional copies of the IE 3.0 CD-Roms which I brought to the conference.

In that context I was very pleased to have Microsoft sponsoring the conference by providing speaker workstations and internet access for the speakers and for the exhibition area. It was a very nice opportunity to showcase Microsoft's Internet technology along with our support for Unicode and National Languages.

I look forward to future Unicode conferences. Clearly the link between Unicode and the Internet will only get stronger.

Murray Sargent from Microsoft wrote:

I bought a copy of the Unicode Standard, Version 2.0. It's just plain damn cool!

As was the conference last week. The Internet was everywhere and Netscape is totally sold on Unicode. Netscape VP Rick Schell says that the paradigm shift away from the desktop PC over to the Internet requires Unicode since you have to have one charset for the world and Unicode is the only viable choice. He even says the reason the major apps are switching to Unicode is because of this paradigm shift! I seem to recall that we switched for other reasons, but nothing like some extra confirmation of our strategy!

Many people emphasized the need to give the charset and lang values in http and html headers. The new charsets for Unicode are almost for sure going to be:

UNICODE-2-0
UNICODE-2-0-UTF7
UNICODE-2-0-UTF8

The UTF8 version is likely to become the most popular. If Netscape and IE both support these as I expect they will, they'll become the worldwide std overnite!

Only one charset is allowed per html doc (unlike the crazy mixture we have to recognize in RTF). If the charset isn't given, Latin 1 (8859-1) is assumed and the user has the option to change it to anything else. So if it's really Shift-JIS, you can change it, but clearly it's better if the doc header gives the correct charset in the first place.