Well... there was only one Unicode in those days. But the vagueness
persisted after its time. This is fine in the consumer documentation,
where it really doesn't matter. But in the development docs it is a real
problem.
Of course, I understand that software development cycles, the size of the
Windows API, and other factors are also involved. And no, Microsoft isn't
alone in this. But it is important to point out to Windows developers
where the documentation is deficient. If we were talking about some other
system, I'd probably have similar comments to make (or worse comments: at
least MS went to the considerable difficulty of building Unicode support
into NT from the get-go).
Regards,
Addison
On Fri, 21 Jul 2000, Doug Ewell wrote:
> Addison Phillips <addison@inter-locale.com> wrote:
>
> > Avoiding for the moment the word-parsing that Markus suggests, Unicode
> > on Microsoft platforms has always been LE (at least on Intel) and they
> > have called the encoding they use "UCS-2" (when they bothered with
> > such things: in the past they always called it "Unicode" as if it were
> > the *only* encoding). As Unicode has evolved, Microsoft products have
> > become more exact in this regard.
>
> I remember that in the early to mid '90s, before the invention (or at
> least widespread use) of UTF-8, UTF-32, and surrogates, *everybody* --
> not just Microsoft -- used the term "Unicode" to refer to what we would
> now call UCS-2. Even the Unicode Consortium did this! And even now,
> the few of my co-workers who know about Unicode (I'm trying to spread
> the word, folks, honest) think a "Unicode text file" is UCS-2 by
> definition. I don't know what they would think of a UTF-8 file --
> nobody but me is knowingly using them yet. In any case, this usage is
> by no means confined to Microsoft.
>
> -Doug Ewell
> Fullerton, California
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:06 EDT