On Thu, 2 May 2002, Markus Kuhn wrote: > > That does make a very convenient excuse for insisting that the other guys > > incur all the pain of conversion. Unfortunately, this does *not* help in > > selling the idea, which was exactly my point. > > You misunderstood. *We* went through the necessary conversion pain > already last century.
You misunderstood too. I'm talking about practical politics, not about right and wrong. Inappropriate though it might be, you will have a much easier time selling a conversion to North Americans if you have to convert at the *same time*. "Oh, we converted long ago" is not a selling point; "we think compatibility is important enough that we will join you in sacrificing our current preferences and switching to a common standard" is. It's not an accident that when a standards body adopts some existing design as the basis of a standard, it often makes small changes and additions. Quite apart from any *technical* merit that has, it means that the existing design's current vendors have to make changes too; this helps sell the new standard to people who will have to retool completely for it. Henry Spencer [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/