- From: Kurosaka, Teruhiko <Teruhiko.Kurosaka@iona.com>
- Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:07:25 -0700
- To: "LUNDER,BEN (HP-Australia,ex3)" <ben.lunder@hp.com>
- Cc: <www-international@w3.org>
> Do you know why utf8 has not been taken up more quickly? Ever wonder why UTF-8 is not popular in Americas? Same reason: Asian countries don't have a great need to use UTF-8. UTF-8 would be very handy when one needs to have C/J/K characters in one HTML page. But such occasion is rare. Other smaller reasons: (1) UTF-8 is still difficult to use; some tools don't support UTF-8 natively. The good old Unix editor "vi" won't be able to show UTF-8 files (unless you use it in a UTF-8 locale in which case localized version of the applications you use might not be available). (2) Some HTML browser do not support UTF-8. (All popular browsers for desktop support UTF-8 since a few years ago but web-phone browser support only a legacy encoding. See i-mode spec.) (3) Use of UTF-8 in conjunction with legacy encodings requires conversions, which tend to be incompatible among vendors/platforms. More likely place UTF-8 is used in the database where the data from C/J/K pages are stored. This is very possible scinario for multi-national companies. T. "Kuro" Kurosaka Internationalization Architect teruhiko.kurosaka@iona.com ------------------------------------------------------- IONA Technologies 2350 Mission College Blvd. Suite 650 Santa Clara, CA 95054 Tel: (408) 350 9684/9500 Fax: (408) 350 9501 ------------------------------------------------------- Making Software Work Together TM
Received on Friday, 16 May 2003 13:12:42 UTC