- From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 10:45:38 -0400
- To: MURATA Makoto <murata@hokkaido.email.ne.jp>, "Aaron Swartz" <me@aaronsw.com>
- Cc: "WWW-Tag" <www-tag@w3.org>, ietf-xml-mime@imc.org
At 20:56 03/09/22 +0900, MURATA Makoto wrote: >On 21 Sep 2003 22:06:30 -0500 >"Aaron Swartz" <me@aaronsw.com> wrote: > > > > I think that persuading users is more difficult than > > > persuading programmers. I have encouraged use of Unicode > > > for XML in Japan, but nothing has happened. > > > > The users shouldn't have to know what a character encoding is! Their > > software should just use UTF-8 automatically. > >Will users discard existing software, which supports legacy encogins, and >existing data, which are in legacy encodings? I am not saying Unicode >everywhere is bad. To the contrary, I think Unicode everywhere is better. >But it is extremely unlikely. New versions of software in many cases supports Unicode. As users upgrade, they will be more and more able to use Unicode. XML made a big step forward by defining UTF-8 and UTF-16 as default encodings required to be understood by the parser. This is helping getting software upgraded. At the next step, some formats may decide to rely even more on Unicode (such as N3). So we are moving in the right direction, slower than we would like, but moving nonetheless. Data will move less quickly than software, that has always been the case. In the short time, many things seem extremely unlikely. But in the long run, we will get closer. Regards, Martin.
Received on Monday, 22 September 2003 10:54:21 UTC