From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 10:50:25 CST
In <yl4r6ikzwb.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Terje Bless <link@pobox.com> writes:
>> As regards your statement; yes, I do believe that Unicode will
>> eventually be the native representation of all OSes and applications.
>Unicode really doesn't have anything to do with this. Unicode isn't an
>encoding, and therefore doesn't help. We can't "use Unicode." That
>doesn't have any useful meaning.
But we can choose to use "Unicode-based" systems. That allows UCS-4,
UCS-2, UTF-16 and UTF-8 (even UTF-7). However, only UTF-8 is suitable for
use on the wire, as the others can contain NUL octets and naked CR and LF.
They are all interchangeable with readily-available libraries to convert
between them.
>The discussion isn't about Unicode. It's about UTF-8. Which is *not* the
>native encoding of much of anything right now, although it's popular in
>some Linux circles. (It's certainly not the native encoding of either
>Java or of Windows.)
All forms of Unicode are potentially available for native use inside
systems, and I would expect all systems to be able to handle certainly
UTF-8 and UTF-16 arriving from outside. Currently, it seems that Unix
systems are tending to UTF-8 internally (except MAC OSX), and Windows are
tending towards UTF-16 internally.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5