--- David Storrs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 04:14:20PM -0600, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 10:07:13PM +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote: > > > The headers I received make no mention of character set - does > your mailer > > > mark the message in any way? If not, then STMP will assume it's > good old > > > 7 bit ASCII > > > > Thus we are back to using uuencode :-) > > > Which, actually, might not be a bad thing. It will give Unicode a > boost by forcing people to become more aware of this issue. To a > large extent, the software industry as a whole is driven by what > makes > the lives of programmers easier--as a simple example, programming > editors are written by and for programmers, who use them to write > other programs. If editors become Unicode by default (both input and > output) then the other programs will start to become Unicode by > default. > > Do we at least all agree that it would be a good thing if Unicode > were > the default character set for everything, everywhere? That is, > editors, xterms, keyboards, etc?
Not just no, but "Hell, no!" The people who love Unicode best are those who've never had to work with it. That being said, I'm the guy who wants it, so what gives? Unicode is way more than most people will ever need. I can't think of very many people who really want sizeof(char) >= sizeof(int). What we need is the ability to support selective Unicodification -- using a simple character set by default, but automatically transitioning/expanding/recoding as appropriate. For example, take your basic simple editor, and have it parse \u21F6 as (whatever glyph that is) and display it correctly. But it is allowed to store \u21F6 in the output stream. Or, have it convert to and from trigraphs. Instead of \u21F6, it could store "~>" (or "??)" or whatever) in the stream. This will encourage terminal software to support fonts that contain the code pages we need, and encourage text editor writers to code in a character-width-independent manner, but won't require the whole operating system to suddenly switch to Unicode. The point is that we know there's lots of utilities out there that we want to continue to be able to use, and they're not Unicode. So while we support unicode, and we lead the way in adopting, integrating, and utilizing Unicode, we have to do it in a way that's compatible with the rest of the world so they'll be encouraged to follow us. =Austin
