Re: Unicode browsers (was: Re: Comments on: "Character Set" Considered Harmful)
Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Wed, 26 Apr 95 22:13:40 EDT
>>There are many small issues, but from my experience, and Amanda and
>>others will verify this, implementing a Unicode based application is
>>*far* easier than trying to support even a small number of coded
>>character sets and encodings.
>
>I disagree.
>
>Supporting canonical Unicode will require major changes to parser and
>layout engines. Supporting ASCII-superset encodings is relatively easy
>and in many case more efficient. UTF8 is an ASCII-superset and would
>fall in the easy to support bucket.
Only because you designed your system with Latin-1 as a basic
assumption. Shoehorning Unicode support onto this may be hard *in the
short term*, but I think you'll find that as you add support for more
and more coded character sets and encodings, you will eventually
produce a system that does exactly this.
>But this is implementation detail, and should be of secondary importance
>in defining our direction. Web content requirements are what should
>be of primary importance.
Quite.