"Addison Phillips" wrote on 1999-07-21 22:03 UTC:
> UTF-8 is a kludge.
Why is UTF-16 better? It just moves the kludge threshold up by 0xff80
but otherwise makes nothing fundamentally simpler.
> UTF-8 is merely a detour (albeit a very useful one).
I am not sure. What you refer to as a "Unicode plain text file" is in
essence UTF-16. UTF-16 also does not have fixed-width characters. Even
UCS-4 doesn't, considering that there are things such as combining
characters.
Unicode is inherently a variable length encoding of characters, and
assuming that UTF-8 is the only variable-length aspect of it might be a
bit naive.
I see UTF-8 not only as a temporary encoding for ASCII legacy systems,
but something that is here to stay for a very long time.
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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