The lack of support for supplementary characters expressed in UTF-8 in the Internet Explorer is a bug. As Philippe Verdy mentions, the Mozilla browser does not have this same bug. Also it should be noted that the Opera browser handles non-BMP UTF-8 just fine.
While working with NCRs may be an ugly nightmare, there are some shortcuts. The BabelPad editor can easily convert between UTF-8 and NCRs. Also, even though Internet Explorer doesn't display the material, it doesn't destroy the encoded text, either. It can be copy/pasted from the browser window into any aware application and retain its content. The Internet Explorer browser itself can convert between UTF-8 and NCR encoding forms with the "File - Save As" command. The Windows registry settings allow a default font to be specified for any plane. I have one font set for Plane One and a different font set for Plane Two in my registry, and Windows seems to handle this well. (Except for the UTF-8 bug in Internet Explorer.) Note also that it is possible to set a font other than the default font for displaying non-BMP text, just as it's possible to change the font in an HTML file. Either with CSS or font-face/family tags. The registry settings should only be for default, in other words if the application or mark-up has not specified another font. I *think* that Windows 2000 uses Unicode always internally and uses an internal conversion chart if material is non-Unicode like GB-18030. As far as I know, this means that GB-18030 support on Win2000 would be limited to Unicode's BMP unless the special registry settings were made. But, I could be wrong on this. Since GB-18030 is important to many, it's very possible that Microsoft already made allowances for this. Best regards, James Kass
