On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 11:31:49 -0700, Preston L. Bannister wrote:
> As a start I would suggest *accepting* UTF8 everywhere ASCII
> (8859_1) is accepted now. I don't think this will break anything,
> and would support all (or most?) local character sets.
>
> I think this is pretty much a no-brainer.
[eaten]
I'm afraid, you haven't read it carefully enough, or just don't understand
the problem (due to being an English-speaking (only) US programmer :).
First, as Mr. Hunter has already said, the UTF8 is not the same as Latin1.
It would instantly create a lot of problems for European users, for
example.
I agree, it would help to support a lot of character sets at once. But do
you really think the customers would appreciate being forced to use a
weird-looking UTF8 in their documents instead of a local character encoding
they used for years? Just imagine an ISP company which hosts a few dozens
of customer web sites...
The same is with the web interface -- I can't really expect the users to
read the documents in Unicode, and submit the forms back in UTF8. There are
still browsers with no MIME charset support at all, I don't even mention
UTF...
The solution I suggested was meant to just add an extra functionality to
help with encoding issues, without changing the way things normally behave.
If you're not using this feature -- it should be 100% the same as before.
> Of course, as an English-speaking (only) US programmer,
> I'm perfectly happy to continue using ASCII... :).
Didn't you ever take part in an international project, like a
multi-language website, a translatable application, etc.? Do you have any
clients outside the States? ;-) A rather interesting experience, I must
say. Try it :)
> I think you need more of a sense of history here :).
Oh, thanks, I have a lot of it...
Sincerely,
Dmitry.
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