Re: [idn] UNIX moving to UTF-8

["Mark Davis" <markdavis34@home.com>]

People are clearly moving to Unicode. Exactly which UTF they choose (8, 16,
32) is not as important, since they all can be converted to each other very
efficiently and without loss.

It is however an overstatement to say that all environments are headed
towards UTF-8. Certainly Windows, JavaScript, and Java use UTF-16; these are
not unimportant. I'm not sure about the Mac, but I believe they are also
UTF-16.

Mark

----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com>
To: "Keith Moore" <moore@cs.utk.edu>
Cc: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>; <idn@ops.ietf.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2001 19:53
Subject: Re: [idn] UNIX moving to UTF-8


>
> Keith Moore wrote:
> >
> > > For extensive evidence that it's happening:
> >
> > that's not anything of the sort.  you cited evidence that a few
> > energetic folks are implementing and modifying existing tools to
> > support UTF-8.
> >
> > that's a far cry from widespread adoption of UTF-8 by real users.
>
> I think it's pretty clear that UTF-8 is the direction that most
> environments are heading to, if they aren't there already.
>
>  - Solaris 7 and higher use UTF-8 for the local (Unicode) interfaces
>  - Windows 2000 and CE use Unicode and UTF-8
>  - MacOS 9 (or X?) and higher same
>  - etc... don't discount the Linux i8n efforts either, it is an extreme
>    likelihood at the very least if not a statement of direction
>
> End-user apps that support UTF-8 include Office 2000 and of course most of
> the modern web/mail front-ends
>
> --
> Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
> Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
>