On Tue, 23 Jan 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Yes, the UTF-8/UCS4 is the ultimate solution for all of us. But why most > of us are not using it? Why most of chinese guys are still using > GB2312/BIG5?
I think the reason is habit and a lot of legacy software. A lot of people don't even know they can use GBK for fantizi, but think they have to switch to using a different character set/encoding (Big5). But what makes you think that many people are still using GB2312 or GBK or Big5? Many businesses have been creating UCS-2 data for 3+ years now, simply by using Microsoft's Office suite. > The most important benefit of GB18030 is the GB2312/GBK users do not need > convert there data/archieves from GB2312/GBK to other encoding to gain the > ability of processing many different languages simultaneously. And they > can convert there data from GB18030 to UTF-8 without losing anything, when > UTF-8/UCS4 is used widely. I think that is the only benefit of GB18030. There is a serious problem if everyone is waiting for someone else to start using UTF-8 (or UTF-16, etc) "widely", because then it will never happen. > I think it will not only waste some CPU cycles but lots of money and time > for most of the chinese guys to convert there data from GB2312/GBK to > UTF-8! It's indeed a hard work! We cannot expect most of the GB2312/GBK > users converting to use UTF-8 in a night or a year! And how much more will it cost after you have an extra year's worth of documents to convert? Thomas Chan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
