Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:21:41 GMT | | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | | Subject | Re: Comments on Microsoft Open Source documentA |
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Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 22:22:36 -0800 (PST) From: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>
4. Unicode makes a displaying problem non-issue (all characters are in one huge font) at the price of modifying all string-handling routines. That however includes complete incompatibility with existing charsets, and lack of language-labeling.
The reality is that you have to odify all string-handling routines anyway, because of languages like Chinese where 8-bit characters simply aren't enough.
You also want to be able to handle multiple languages using different character sets inside one particular document, which is in fact *simpler* to do with Unicode, since it's all (as you put it) one gigantic font. If you don't do this, you end up needing to have magic character-set switching escape sequences (or MIME-style headers, or some other complex solution), and your string and display routines end up getting just as complex, if not more so.
The bottom line is that doing internationalization is hard. As one I18N expert was heard to say, "It would be easier to teach them all English." Any solution will end up impacting some people more than others. It is no doubt true that UTF-8 may end up impacting certain people more than others. But the backwards compatibility aspects of UTF-8, combined with the undeniable perponderence of where computers systems are deployed (i.e., U.S. and Europe) means that it was inevitable that UTF-8 would be chosen as the most pragmatic solution which impacts the smallest number of people and allows for the easist transition to a full I18N support.
From where I sit, Microsoft wasn't the only company pushing Unicode; the push for Unicode and UTF-8 came from all directions, not just Microsoft. Or are you going to claim that the developers of Perl and X are pawns of Microsoft? Instead, it seems pretty clear that Perl and X chose UTF-8 because it's the sanest way to make the very hard transition from 8-bit characters to supporting internationalization, including character sets that simply won't fit in 256 character slots.
Finally, what in the world does this have to do with the Linux kernel? Followups to /dev/null, please.
- Ted
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