Paul Keinanen wrote: > Regarding how to describe Unicode in the public, I think it is best to > say that it can encode more than a million characters, of which about > 100000 (in 3.1) is used. It is better to defer the discussion of any > transformation forms to a much later stage. I don't agree. UTF's are the *surface* of Unicode, so many people's first (or only) contact with Unicode is when they meet terms like "UTF-8" or "Unicode (Big-Endian)" in the head of their HTML files, or in the user interface of their word processors. I feel that there is a need for short but accurate explanations of what these acronyms mean. In particular, simply saying that Unicode has one million possible characters creates unjustified alarm about the need of huge memory requirements and/or complicated specialized applications. Particularly, not mentioning the existence of UTF-8 hides the reassuring fact that Unicode may be as compatible with ASCII-oriented applications as any other encoding systems. And this is an information of a great practical value. (And you should not forget a fastidious but unfortunately true fact: people making decision are always too busy to listen to long explanations, and almost always too idiot to understand them. So either you prepared short and well-conceived explanations to convince them, or you have a gun and no witnesses around, or they will very likely make wrong decisions. ;-) _ Marco
