Re: Updated article: Who uses Unicode?

On 2010/09/04 20:58, Gunnar Bittersmann wrote:
> “It it sometimes assumed that Unicode is a popular encoding "behind the
> scenes" but rarely used on the home pages of major Web sites.”
>
> <tongue-in-cheek>
> Shouldn’t that sentence better read:
> It it sometimes assumed that Unicode is a popular encoding "behind the
> scenes" but this is never the case. Unicode ist not a character encoding.
> Unicode is a character set and is used on all Web pages of the world.
> [http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-doc-charset]
> </tongue-in-cheek>

Why not just fix this to "It it sometimes assumed that Unicode is
popular only "behind the scenes" but rarely used on the home pages of 
major Web sites."

That leaves the encoding/character set distinction (which is mostly 
irrelevant here) out of the picture.

For the rest of the article (which I have to admit I haven't read), I'd 
suggest to either also make the above change, or to speak of a concrete 
encoding (UTF-8, because Unicode on the Web essentially means UTF-8), 
depending on the circumstances.

Regards,   Martin.

> Other W3C i8n articles try to make clear the difference between
> character set and character encoding, but the wording used in this
> article kind of undermines this.
>
> Suggestion: Replace "Unicode" with "a Unicode encoding" throughout the
> article.
>
> And replace "home pages" with "Web pages" or (better) delete and make it:
> It it sometimes assumed that Unicode encodings are popular "behind the
> scenes" but rarely used on major Web sites.
>
> Regards,
> Gunnar
>
>

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Monday, 6 September 2010 04:09:47 UTC