At 02:43 8.6.1999 -0700, Markus Kuhn wrote:
>But as people start using UTF-8 now, supporting the more recent ISO 8859
>political correctness extensions will just add user confusion. More
>options -> more confusion. Make your users happy by *not* supporting all
>the latest ISO 8859 hacks and instead encourage your users to settle on
>Unicode and UTF-8. A broad migration from ISO 8859-1 to ISO 8859-15 is
>*NOT* what will help us in eventually migrating to ISO 10646, and should
>therefore not be encouraged in any way. If you have to support ISO
>8859-15 for any regulatory reasons, please sabotage it as well as you
>can, just like the X Consortium did so nicely in X11R6.4.
This is just putting the head in the sand.
In Finnish news and e-mail messages the Euro sign has been used for a while
and sometimes you see even S-caron and Z-caron, but so far they have been
all encoded in Windows CP-1252. When finally the ISO 8859-15 has become a
fixed standard, now it is finally possible to encoded these characters in a
vendor independent way in an 8 bit environment. The "competetion" is not
between 8859-1 vs. 8859-15 but rather between 8859-x vs. CP-1252.
The Euro sign is going to be widely used within EU anyway and it is
unrealistic to think that people would would completely switch to UCS-2 (or
UTF-8) abandoning all old software, just in order to be able to use the Euro
sign. If the 8859-15 would have been further delayed, there would have been
a great risk of multiple mutually incompatible vendor specific encodings for
the Euro sign.
Paul Keinänen
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:46 EDT