Good point concerning "Windows programmers". But don't confuse them with the commercial software developers. I mean, since M$ makes things easy, Windows programmers, on average, are not as good as *NIX programmers, because they are not required to understand low-level stuff. But you won't assume M$ developers or IBM developers will be as idiotic. -- They are investing for the long term so they care about internationalization. Other ISVs may not do as well. (Um, a little off-topic now.)
No, Gtk is not non-Asian. I am comfortable with Gtk applications on Linux (excluding the desktop, which I prefer KDE). But I did have some bad experience with Windows Gtk applications running on Chinese versions of Windows. Not for functionality, but for UI. You are right that they do care about Asian languages, but the problem seems that they may not have the hands to test on Asian language platforms. At least not on Simplified Chinese Windows. Not their fault, I must add. Ah, I cannot bear setting Linux locale to Chinese, which makes the desktop too ugly to me. Rationale: The good intent of Open Source developers may not result in understanding the requirements of Asian users owing to lack of native developers/testers/users. There seems little sense now arguing the virtues of UTF-8 and UTF-16. Technically they both have advantages and disadvantages. I suppose we have presented enough of them in this discussion. Best regards, Wu Yongwei --- Original Message from srintuar26 --- > But this is only one possibility. For Asians, UTF-16 is really more > "economic" than UTF-8. UTF-8 in Perl, GNOME, and other Open Source > software seems connected with the facts that they are mainly developed > and used by Western developers/users and they have a root in Unix. I think you are wrong about that. Gnome/GTK programmers, in my observation, are very much concerned with asian languages in particular. (Thats not even mentioning the native speakers themselves) Ive also worked with Windows platform programmers, and on average they are much less concerned with other languages, and almost as a rule code their string manipulation in ways which are guaranteed to break UTF-16. (Thats when they even use utf-16 at all, mostly they stick to ascii, or zero-padded-ascii) I think its important for the programmer to be confronted with UTF-8. If they are led to believe that the "platform handles it automatically" they will continue to make mistakes based upon false assumptions. This may be just my own experience, but I'm will to bet youve mischaracterized Gnome as being "non-asian". -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
