Re: [idn] What's wrong with skwan-utf8?

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 00/12/26 15:20 +0800, James Seng/Personal wrote:

>For those who uses Unicode/ISO10646 as the core, they tend to use wchar_t
>internally which is either 16bit/32bit depending on platform.
>
>_Some_ software use UTF-8 thru out but it is definately not a common feature
>until recently.

As I said, web browsers support it, and they are the most important
clients for multilingual domain names. Also, conversion from
UTF-16 or UCS-4 to UTF-8 is very simple and has been implemented
dozens of times. The ACE proposals I have looked at are quite a bit
more complicated, and there is rarely much code yet.


> > It's easy to imagine a world where 8859-1, JIS, KOI-8, and so on have
> > all disappeared in favor of UTF-8. People are doing the UI work needed
> > to get there; see, e.g., http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html.
>
>Actually, I see resistant for people to drop their legacy encodings in favour
>of UTF-8.

Many programmers resist, because they have invested too much into
legacy encodings. But the actual end users couldn't care less about
what is used internally, if it just works. The best example is probably
software such as MS Office, which changed from legacy encodings to
Unicode without really any significant percentage of the users
noticing.

Also, we know pretty much that basing on anything else than the UCS
isn't going to scale well for what we want.


Regards,   Martin.