Re: UTF-16 inside UTF-8

[YTang0648]

In a message dated 11/5/2003 2:03:37 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I don't know about the relative market needs.  I think supplementary character support is important because these characters are part of Unicode just as much as BMP characters are, And don't forget, many people think some of the BMP characters are not important for their software. And that is probably the exact reason why MES-1, MES-2 and MES-3 got created. For Front-End software, it is quite difficult, or I should say impossible to support even the whole BMP. I crrently see NO front-end software 100% support the whole Unicode BMP correctly from input to rendering. Name me one and I can tell you what they didn't do. For back end software which do pure data process without keyboard input or text rendering, it is eaiser to implement the whole Unicode BMP range or even with the surrogate. and implementing UTF-8 support for the entire Unicode code space is about 0.1% harder than artificially crippling it by restricting it to the BMP. Disagree about what you said "about 0.1 % harder".   For many developers, adding 4 bytes UTF-8 to surrogate support simply mean open a can of worm. After that, they need to worry about how to support surrogate, which is quite complex in the api design/change. The work to make the converter convert UTF-8 to a surrogate pair and back is probably as you said "0.1 harder". But work AFTER they open such door is much harder to manage. As the famouse saying "Unicode is not the answer for Internationalization, Unicode is the question for the Internationalization". Thanks for all the job opportunity Unicode standard created (and keep creating)  of us :)   -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/   ================================== Frank Yung-Fong Tang System Architect, I�t�rn�ti�n�l D�v�l�pme�t, AOL Int�r��t�v� S�rvi�es AIM:yungfongta mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel:650-937-2913 Yahoo! Msg: frankyungfongtan John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Does your software display Thai language text correctly for Thailand users? -> Basic Conceptof Thai Language linked from Frank Tang's I�t�rn�ti�n�liz�ti�n Secrets Want to translate your English text to something Thailand users can understand ? -> Try English-to-Thai machine translation at http://c3po.links.nectec.or.th/parsit/