On Friday, March 22, 2002, at 01:13 , Mark Davis wrote: > There might be a wee bit more Unicode around in Japan than people > realize. Anyone using MS Office or Windows NT/2000/XP is using Unicode > under the hood; the same is true for others. Many servers keep Unicode > on the back-end (that way they can mix data from different languages > without loss), and then serve up the data in whatever code pages the > browser is configured for. Etc.
And don't forget MacOS after 8.1; Even its file system is in Unicode. To get the most out of new HFS+, you need MacOS X, however. But so long as a given encoding is under the hood, it doesn't matter much. Mule has been using a funky internal encodings for a long time and no one complains. Its true success or failure should be judged as external encodings. As for that, Unicode is yet to be successful, even compared to ISO-2022 variants. Which is sad for me because UTF-8 is one of few Unicode things I love. (I know many Japanese complain for each Kanji taking up 3 bytes instead of two but data sizes I don't care much; You can always compress with gzip or bzip and BASE64 and others are already bloating TCP streams....) Dan the Author of Encode and MacOSX::File
