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

Amanda Walker (amanda@intercon.com)
Thu, 4 May 95 01:54:59 EDT

> Hack all you want. Put out a proposal. Lobby for support. But by
> the time you've done this, the servers will be reved to support
> a non-hack solution, ala:

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.

But I don't think the server operators are actually at fault. I think
that creating something called the "world wide web" that can't handle
multilingual text in a reasonably unambiguous fashion was a significant
oversight.

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...

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation