RE: OS 99

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed Nov 11 1998 - 15:29:49 EST


Smita,

your comment is well taken. The mail in question was probably not meant to
go to go out on this wide an alias in this form. Last I saw it, it was being
circulated among knowledgeable people to try to gather information on Unicode
support in OS's, not in order to 'publish' a list of compliant systems.

"Unicode compliant" is a term that is fraught with problems, because it is
in fact not defined anywhere in the standard. "Unicode conformant" is the
legal term, however, we should not officially use it as header on the table
below, since the consortium are not certifying conformance.

"Supports Unicode" is the informal term for attempting to be Unicode
conformant, but not implying the same guarantees that "Unicode conformant"
entails.

Unicode 'compliant' gets mistaken for Unicode 'conformant' too easily,
which is bad. The chart should be entitled

"Operating systems which support Unicode.

Finally, I believe this is true for the Windows family.

>Windows NT all yes yes
>Windows CE yes yes
>Windows 95 no some *)
>Windows 98 no some *)
>Windows 2000 yes yes

*) code set conversions and limited, low level text output

If anybody else has information on what to add here, please send it
to info@unicode.org (not the whole list please). We are considering
posting the table on our web site.

BTW, if someone wants to sumamrize the browsers for us in the same manner
please send info to info@unicode.org

A./

At 07:42 AM 11/10/98 -0800, you wrote:
>What are the criteria for making "Unicode compliant"? Is it the ability
>to convert to and from or actual support in all functions?
>In the list below, I see a lot of instances where the latter would not
>work, e.g. Windows 9x, Solaris 2.6 etc.. Win 9x does not have Unicode
>support for "all" APIs and Solaris 2.6 has no support except for to/from
>conversion, at least as far as I know.
>
>Just curious,
>Smita
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julia Oesterle (Unicode)
>[mailto:v-juliao@microsoft.com]
> Sent: Monday, November 09, 1998 9:54 PM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: FW: OS 99
>
> Hi -- update help requested:
>
> > A year ago, the question of which OSs were Unicode
>compliant was answered
> > and
> > we constructed the following chart:
> >
> > \OS Version UI API
> > Sun Solaris 2.6 yes yes
> > IBM AIX 4.1x yes no
> > IBM OS/2 4.1 no yes
> > IBM OS/400 3.7 no yes
> > SGI IRIX* 6.4 no no
> > Next Open Step yes yes
> > Apple Rhapsody yes yes
> > NetWare 4.x no yes
> > Windows NT 4.x yes yes
> > Windows 95 no yes
> > Windows 98 no yes
> > Linux no response
> > *(IRIX supports conversions between UCS4, UCS2, UTF8 &
>other character
> > sets)
> >
> > Has this changed?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Julia Oesterle
>
>



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