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

["Carl S. Gutekunst" <csg@eng.sun.com>]

> >Yes. Windows 2000 Professional -  Multililanguage version.
> 
>         Many applications, including some widely used MUAs, 
> on Win2k Multilingual do NOT handle UTF8 correctly.  If this 
> is the best you can come up with, you aren't being persuasive.

Windows NT has supported UCS-2 (not UTF-8) natively since it's first release
back in 1993. The APIs are straightforward and work well when used correctly;
it's a vastly cleaner interface that anything we have on UNIX.

Yet a sizable number of current applications -- including applications from
Microsoft itself -- do not support Unicode, and many that do, do not do so
consistently. A cut-and-paste from a Unicode-aware window (say, Internet
Explorer's main browse window) to a random text entry field will, likely as
not, yield a row of question marks, little square boxes, or (worst case) wrong
text. The most aggrevating and inexcusable example is Outlook's LDAP browse
window, which will not accept Unicode input and quite happily stuffs Latin 1
8-bit characters into the LDAP attributes.

If Microsoft didn't get LDAP right -- which natively uses UTF-8 -- I really
don't really think we can depend on anyone to get anything else right, either.

<csg>