UTF-8 (was: Re: property names)

On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 05:28:28PM +0100, Branko Cibej wrote:
> Greg Stein wrote:
>
> >> UTF-8 isn't universally accepted and won't be for a long time. Ask any
> >> Japanese.
> >>
> >> (File name encoding is different in that it's not visible to the user.)
> >
> >
> > Our entire system is UTF-8 based. We aren't going to escape from that.
>
> As far as I can see, our entire system isn't based on anything right
> now. :-)

XML is implicitly UTF-8 or UCS-2, unless otherwise specified. And many
parsers don't really support alternate encodings/charsets well. For example,
Expat is really designed just for UTF-8 and UCS-2.

The FS API specifies UTF-8. Nobody has really clarified/stated it elsewhere,
but that has been the basic assumption.

I also see a good amount of "network effects" for the UTF-8 choice. For
example, Perl and Python work very well with UTF-8 data. The XML stuff. etc.

> (I for one would gladly ditch all that crap for iso-10646 and be done

ISO-10646 is UCS-2, right?

UTF-8 represents the same set of characters, so I see them as equivalent.

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/