Windows NT only supported UCS-2, which was the encoding available back in the Unicode 1.0 standard. EFI began at a similar time. At that time, the Unicode organization believed that 64K character values would be enough to hold all necessary characters, especially after their successful efforts with Asian fonts.
UTF-16 was added later (along with UTF-32 and UTF-8) to support the reality that 64K character values were not enough. Later versions of Windows adopted UTF-16, because it was a change that used a previously undefined range of character values and thus was generally backward compatible, and gave them the full range of values. Tim -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Fish [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 9:57 AM To: David Woodhouse Cc: Tim Lewis; [email protected] Subject: Re: [edk2] How to align auto variables? On May 14, 2013, at 12:31 AM, David Woodhouse <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, 2013-02-14 at 19:22 +0000, Tim Lewis wrote: >> David, BTW, technically the UEFI spec doesn't use UTF-16. It uses >> UCS-2, an older subset of UTF-16. Tim > > Coming back to this somewhat later... I think Windows *does* implement > UTF-16, doesn't it? > > See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/05/11/416552.aspx > > If I'm reading this correctly, it's essentially a retrospective > declaration that Windows always *did* use UTF-16, but it just never > used any of the code points where you'd be able to tell the difference? > > Should we do the same thing for EFI? > This has never come up as a real world issue. I'm no Unicode expert, but I think the stuff on the fringes deals with minutia like dead languages. I've not seen a lot of requests for setup pages localized to languages that have not been spoken in the last thousand years. > After all, the consistency with Windows is fairly much the only > justification for the bizarre decision to use UCS-2 in the first > place, surely? Otherwise I'd expect it really ought to have been UTF-8 > from the beginning. > I don't know that it really matters what encoding is actually used as long as there are tools support to edit the text file that contains the Unicode string. If this is causing folks issues I'm guessing it would be easy enough to have a version of the uni file that was encoded in UTF-8 and supported by the tools. Thanks, Andrew Fish > -- > dwmw2 > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. Download a free trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/alienvault_d2d _______________________________________________ edk2-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/edk2-devel
