On a somewhat related topic, the other day I got onto a Windows XP system and took a look at the Help item for "Unicode." You might remember that I chided Microsoft for its definition of "Unicode" in Windows 2000 Help, where Unicode was described as a "16-bit standard" that was "developed between 1988 and 1991," implying that the work was finished. Even at the time Windows 2000 was being developed, there was quite a bit of room for improvement in this definition.
So I was pleased to see a much better definition in Windows XP, including separate descriptions of UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. IIRC, there was some acknowledgement of the existence of supplementary characters. There is still a minor problem -- the abbreviation "UCS" is expanded to "Unicode Character System" instead of "Universal Character Set" -- but this is not going to mislead users greatly. I believe the definitions found in Windows Help are important because many users will go to them first. Awareness and understanding of Unicode among ordinary users is still not what it should be. Many still believe in automatic doubling of file sizes, for example. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
