- From: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
- Date: 21 Sep 2003 10:52:33 -0500
- To: "MURATA Makoto" <murata@hokkaido.email.ne.jp>
- Cc: "WWW-Tag" <www-tag@w3.org>, ietf-xml-mime@imc.org
> I'm just saying UTF-8 everywhere is even more unrealistic than any > other options at hand. Too bad, because it's the only option that's remotely practical in the long term. Do you really think every programmer who wants to mung text is going to include code that supports not only the hundreds of extant character encodings but also the seventeen kinds of in-band and out-of-band declarations of them? Even if there was a easily-usable well-supported library to do all this, and you managed to get everyone to use it, the minor differences between encodings hidden by its abstractions would lead to subtle bugs that would continue to plague international users and force them to be second-class citizens forever. If you want international users to be on the same level as those who just use plain ASCII, a drop-in solution is the only way to go, and UTF-8 is the obvious drop-in solution. -- Aaron Swartz: http://www.aaronsw.com/ (For the purposes of this email, "international users" are users who need characters other than those in plain ASCII.)
Received on Sunday, 21 September 2003 11:52:38 UTC