From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Tue Dec 02 2003 - 05:17:55 EST
On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Markus Scherer wrote:
> Question: Is the ISO-2022-CN or ISO-2022-CN-EXT charset for Chinese actually used significantly?
With 'significantly' at the end, the answer is absolutely NO.
Even without it, I think the answer would still be very definitive NO.
If you count X11 Compound Text encoding (used for the inter-client
communication) and Mule's internal encoding (Mule : Multilngual Extension
of Emacs??. It's been a part of Emacs since Emacs 20?) as 'ISO-2022-CN',
the answer would be a little different. Both use the ISO 2022 escape
and shift mechanism to designate (as graphic character sets, G0 .. G3)
and invoke multiple CCS' alternately in GL (and GR). So does ISO 2022-CN.
> However, I would like to know if ISO-2022-CN is actually used, or
Mark Crispin(one of co-authors of RFC 1922 and one of lead
developers of Pine and UWimapd at Univ. of Washington) once wrote that
he had used ISO 2022-CN(-Ext) a few times, but I guess that's about it.
> Do you have anecdotal evidence from what Chinese versions and
> competitors of Hotmail, AOL, etc. do for email/SMTP charsets for
> Chinese?
'GB2312'(EUC-CN [1])/GBK/GB18030 for SC and Big5 for TC.
> Do you know of any source of statistics for this kind of question?
I'm sorry I don't, but I'm sure that emails/web pages/news postings
in ISO-2022-CN account for less than 'a billionth' of the total number
of emails/web pages/news postings in Chinese.
Jungshik
[1]
> if Chinese users and their
> software rather use other charsets like GB 2312, GBK, GB 18030, Big 5,
> EUC-CN, EUC-TW, HZ.
As a charset label (MIME sense), GB 2312 is as inappropriate as KS C
5601/KS X 1001 is, but it's so widely used that it's impossible to
rectify it (let alone being 'endorsed' as the preferred MIME name).
Anyway, when used in MIME-charset-sense, EUC-CN (GB 2312 in GR and
US-ASCII/ISO-646:CN in GL) and GB2312 are synonymous as you probably know.
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