On Sat, Mar 17, 2007 at 06:25:59PM +0600, Christopher Fynn wrote: > Colin Paul Adams wrote: > > >>>>>>"Rich" == Rich Felker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > Rich> Indeed, this was what I was thinking of. Thanks for > > Rich> clarifying. BTW, any idea WHY they brought the UTF-16 > > Rich> nonsense to DOM/DHTML/etc.? > > >I don't know for certain, but I can speculate well, I think. > > >DOM was a micros**t invention (and how it shows!). NT was UCS-2 > >(effectively). > > AFAIK Unicode was originally only planned to be a 16-bit encoding. > the The Unicode Consortium and ISO 10646 then agreed to synchronize the > two standards - though originally Unicode was only going to be a 16-bit > subset of the UCS. A little after that Unicode decided to support UCS > characters beyond plane 0. > > Anyway at the time NT was being designed (late eighties) Unicode was > supposed to be limited to < 65536 characers and UTF-8 hadn't been > thought of, so 16-bits probably seemed like a good idea.
While this is probably true, it's also aside from the point. I wasn't asking why Windows used UCS-2, but why JavaScript remained stuck on the 16bit idea even after the character set expanded -- since JS is a pretty high level lang and the size of types is largely irrelevant, redefining characters to be 32bit integers shouldn't have broken anything. Rich -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
