Re: charset labelling [was: ISO/IEC 10646 as Document Character Set]

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Thu, 4 May 95 04:39:12 EDT

>Great. My experience so far with WWW server operators (in general,
>not just in Japan) is that they will rev their servers only when their
>users force them at gunpoint :). I am reminded of the B News cutover.

Actually, Japanese WWW admins. will generally upgrade pretty quickly,
provided it's pretty painless. Japanese, in general, like new things
(witness housing, cars, clothes). In other words, get support into
clients, then deploy servers. There will be very little flak. Japanese
do not generally complain about things that cannot be changed either
(witness Kobe).

>But for the record, all of this is in the realm of convenience. I'd much
>rather see IS 10646 content (and perhaps servers that can translate specific
>kinds of existing content to IS 10646 on the fly) than character set
>labelling hacks. I'm just not optimistic so far on how quickly that is
>likely to happen...

I sympathise with this statement... (an understatement if ever I saw
one ;-))