On 2007-10-18, Nicolas Mailhot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Le jeudi 18 octobre 2007 à 18:31 +0000, Tuomo Valkonen a écrit : >> On 2007-10-18, Russell Shaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > I find it hard to see those problems because i rarely handle non-english >> > text. >> >> Which problems? The ones with present abstraction implementations >> (wchar_t, locale), or the general unknown encoding fuckup? > > The general unknown encoding fuckup is file formats do not specify > encodings, filesystems do not specify encodings, C primitives do not > specify encodings, english speakers do not care and will just use > defaults (and the software industry is US-centered), etc > > You can rave all you want things should be nicely tagged with encodings > but they aren't and won't be till an awful lot of otherwise perfectly > working code is rewritten. > > So the next best thing is a good universal default. Which UTF-8 is. So > live with it (or join unicode.org to get it improved). > > The single best feature of XML was not making possible to tag stuff with > encodings (HTML had it before, as SGML). The single best feature of XML > was to select UTF-8 as default encoding, so stuff is internationalised > by default. > > Before people would assume random mixes of windows US encoding, > iso-8859-1, US-ASCII, local encoding, and tag their files with something > else. NO ONE used nor uses ISO-8859-15 even though one of the symbols it > is required for (the euro) is one of the most used currencies in the > world. If UTF-8 had not spread and apps were not special-casing euro for > all the documents that pretend to be iso-8859-1 stuff would be broken > all over the place. And you know what? Situation for scripts that do not > have the first or second world economy behind them is worse. > > So it's fun to shot at UTF-8. UTF-8 is ugly. UTF-8 reeks of compromise. > But UTF-8 works which was not the case of all the solutions UTF-8 haters > dreamed before and still cling to. >
-- Tuomo _______________________________________________ wm-spec-list mailing list wm-spec-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/wm-spec-list