> Comments on:
>
> Locale name guideline [Public Review Draft 2001-05-31]
> http://www.li18nux.org/docs/text/locale-name-20010531.txt
> ...
> one day, when UTF-8 has become the almost exclusively used encoding...
>
I haven't been following this stuff at all, but I assume that when this
happens, we'll also have a UTF-8 based file system, with file and directory
names in UTF-8, and all the rest. Yikes! Imagine the possibilities for
mistaking one file for another, not finding a desired file, deleting the
wrong file, etc, unless absolutely *everybody* agrees on *exactly* how at
least the following things are handled:
. Case mapping on case-insensitive file systems
. Canonical composition or decomposition
. Canonical ordering of combining characters
Not to mention issues of sorting and collation, e.g. for listing files
in "alphabetical" order. Nor to mention the many and varied "versions"
of UTF-8, or the eternally shifting landscape of Unicode/ISO10646 itself.
Even if Linux gets it right, then we have cross-platform issues such as
NFS mounts, FTP, and so on. I assume some group somewhere is working on
all this...
The mind boggles. Obviously we have the same issues in network domain
names, email addresses, and every other service that looks up character
strings.
- Frank
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
