On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 10:34:05PM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote: > The threat is that, if portable round-trip conversions arne't available, > some users (programmers) who value round-trip compatibility more than > Unicode will break spec and dump native charsets in the files. (This > *did* happen with ID3 tags; this isn't a made-up threat.) That's > probably the single worst case scenario, and must be avoided.
Did it happen with ID3 tags? Yes, SJIS got placed in a ID3 Tag that was defined to be Unicode-only. But unless you actually talked to the person who did this and got an explanation why, I'd highly suspect it had nothing to do with relative quality of the charsets; I'd guess it was because the programs that read the tags wasn't doing conversions, so the only way to get readable Japanese out of the tag was to use native charsets. This is something that very few people running Windows would ever notice. They would have to transfer the files over to another computer running a different operating system using one of the disputed characters in the tag, and notice the error. (Many systems will display the Unicode correctly, even if it doesn't round trip. Since most (all?) of the disputed characters are symbols mapped to closely related characters in the Unicode standard (fullwidth em-dash going to em-dash or quotation-dash), it may not be obvious that there was a change.) In many cases, using native charsets would have caused a worse problem, since the other system wouldn't have read them at all. -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED], dvdeug/jabber.com (Jabber) Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org When the aliens come, when the deathrays hum, when the bombers bomb, we'll still be freakin' friends. - "Freakin' Friends" -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
