Re: UTF-16 is not Unicode

From: Martin Kochanski (unicode@cardbox.net)
Date: Tue Feb 12 2002 - 03:35:02 EST


As a poor software maker, I suppose I ought to defend other software makers. EVERYONE KNOWS that Unicode and UTF-16 are the same thing. It is, unfortunately, irrelevant that in this case (as in so many others) "what everyone knows" happens to be untrue. We exist to conform to the user's expectations, not to educate him; still less to confuse him by replacing a nice simple word (Unicode) with indigestible code letters and digits (UTF-16BE or whatever).

That said, has anyone a suggestion for names of available output formats (as presented to an end user) that would not confuse the user but would satisfy the purist?

>Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 07:10:23 -0700
>From: Tom Gewecke <tom@bluesky.org>
>Subject: Re: Unicode 3.2 comments
>
>
>I'm not qualified to comment on the various issues raised by Mr. Hopwood,
>but I do hope that the definitions can be written to avoid confusion
>between Unicode as such and the various UTF's. I constantly run into
>browser, mail, and text editing software with encoding menus that list, as
>two separate items, Unicode and UTF-8, as if Unicode and UTF-16 were
>identical and as if UTF-8 were not Unicode.



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