>Yeah, UTF-8 is a hack. Consider this, if the world was starting with a clean
>slate right now to design software and encodings from scratch, there would be
>one encoding that would work for ALL text, UTF-16 (ok, unless you're klingon
>or using really obscure chinese). All code would deal with it, etc. UTF-8
It seems that your opinion is that of ignoramus vulgaris. I have to remember you that
at least 9/10 of Earthlings (not including elves and klingon) use characters that
aren't ASCII at all ! It's good that you have 20+ years of programming experience but
if you haven't written programs that have to deal with so called exotic languages your
experience is worth little penny here.
As for me, I'am currently working on project, which has to deal (theoretically) with
all the languages of the Earth. Now we have at least Russian, English, Deutsch,
Francais, Italiano, Espagnol. They all use 8-bits but it's a real pain to handle them
all. Especially when you have to support obsolete browsers.
I agree with you that fixed length characters are simpler to understand for us,
"legacy programmers". However it's realy evident that UTF-16 doesn't suffice for Earth
languages. So the only way is to replace legacy software and "legacy programmers" with
ones that think characters not bytes not words when thinking about strings. And no
matter what byte-length one character is.
Oleg Assovski
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