Pete, I'm not sure you're going to get sensible answers to your questions without providing a lot more details about what you're talking about. Guessing that you're talking about a client development SDK of some kind, I think the questions that need to be answered are what programming language and what OS(s) are you targeting? If C and Windows is your target, your interfaces need to be UTF-16 (not UTF-8) since UTF-16 is what a Windows "wide char" is. Other languages and OSs might drive other choices. One problem is that most developers know very little about the details of character encodings (even on the system they program in, let alone other systems), so to some extent the more you hide these details (like, say, Windows does) the more your developers will like you. On the other hand, to provide interoperable email text must be MIME encoded with an identified character set and who (or what) you're interoperating with likely constrains the character sets you should use for MIME encoding. I think the net result is that simple (for developers) is not likely to be highly interoperable and highly interoperable is not likely to be simple.
-Rick Block
Pete Maclean wrote:
But would someone developing a Japanese-market email client be content to work internally using only Unicode or would he want to actually handle the data in those other charsets?
