Tuomo, You're advocating a lot of code churn and backwards-incompatible changes for what? There is no practical alternative encoding to UTF-8 today. Do you really think people are going to change and rewrite all the huge existing code base just in case some hypothetical alternative to UTF-8 emerges one day? (and make no mistake, new code reuses old code so changing only new code to take encoding into account is useless)
No one but developers having to deal with unicode complexities mourn the pile of pre-unicode encoding standards. They didn't work. With or without encoding tagging. They sort-of worked with single-language single-script users that never communicated with people outside their language bubble but that's not what people needed 50 years ago and that's even less what they need today (globalized world, remember?). They are not a credible alternative to unicode, never been and never will be. And no one is working on a unicode alternative today. Even if someone was it took decades for the unicode consortium to arrive at the state you complain of. This is gigantic work. Unicode.org happened because an international encoding was sorely needed, now there is one (not pretty but good enough and getting better) I don't seen anyone investing the same decades of work in something that may or may not end up less quirky. If you don't like the unicode consortium choices, and are not willing to rectify them from within this organisation, found your alternative organisation and propose a workable alternative to UTF-8. And then people may see the usefulness of not targeting an unicode monoculture. But as long as there is effectively a single working international encoding standard in the world, people will target it exclusively, and that's not because they are dumb that's because they have other things on their plate than preparing for something that may or may not happen in their lifetime. It's totally useless to complain at them unless you have a workable UTF-8 alternative hidden in your pocket. -- Nicolas Mailhot _______________________________________________ wm-spec-list mailing list wm-spec-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/wm-spec-list