At 14:28 -0600 2002-02-12, David Starner wrote: > >What happens when a user is told to save in UTF-16? What about when two >users running different operating systems try to pass files about? And >why would Unicode be any clearer to a naive user than UTF-16? > >IMO, UTF-16 is as clear as Unicode, and more accurate. Being consistent >among platforms is a needed plus.
Internet Explorer calls Unicode (UTF-8) "Universal Alphabet". Now I would say pretty much the same thing to the layman, but the distinction between what's on the web (UTF-8) and what might be coded elsewhere (UTF-16) should be made. Apple's TextExit with OS X gives a set of choices for encodings to the user in the Open File dialogue: Western (Mac Roman) Western (Windows Latin 1) Japanese (Mac OS) Japanese (Shift JIS) Traditional Chinese (Mac OS) Simplified Chinese (Mac OS) Korean (Mac OS) Unicode UTF-8 Apple's OS 9 WorldText can save as UTF-16 but calls it "Standard Unicode". Cyclone's Unicode options are four: Standard (16 bit) Standard (16 bit) Canonical Decomposition UTF-7 UTF-8 These distinctions are interesting. It shows that many users are expected to know, or find out, about specific encoding differences. I think it's clear that Unicode should give some advice as to how to announce encoding options in a useful way to the end user. For the two encodings we are discussing, may I suggest the following standard menu items: Unicode (Raw, UTF-16) Unicode (Web, UTF-8) -- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
