RE: Why is UTF8 not being taken up in Asia Pacific for Public Websites?

Mixing C/J/K may have been rare in the past, but it is becoming
less rare.  Especially since there are two kinds of "C":
simplified and traditional.  Mixing CHS and CHT is becoming
more common and is a requirement for many software products.

-Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Kurosaka, Teruhiko [mailto:Teruhiko.Kurosaka@iona.com]
Sent: Freitag, 16. Mai 2003 10:07
To: LUNDER,BEN (HP-Australia,ex3)
Cc: www-international@w3.org
Subject: RE: Why is UTF8 not being taken up in Asia Pacific for Public
Websites?




 > 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
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Received on Friday, 16 May 2003 14:54:25 UTC