On Saturday, June 29, 2002, at 07:14 AM, Tex Texin wrote:
> Instead we should ask the vendors why they default to these code pages
> for WRITING web pages.
> The default code page for creating new pages should be different than
> the default setting used to override unlabeled web pages that are being
> read. Of course it should be Unicode for writing.
I can tell it is very unlikely that web authoring software vendors
defaults their products to Unicode (UTF-16 or UTF-8). One big reason is
i-Mode, a web service for mobile phones by NTT Docomo; that uses
Shift_JIS. Tough the choice of Shift_JIS was a big disappointment for
me (why not EUC_JP, which is much easier for CGI writers?) I can see why
they chose not to use Unicode; It's simply too fat for memory-tight
handsets. And with 9600bps an extra byte for every single Kanji via
UTF-8 does make big difference.
Though I second the concepts of Unicode, I see no reasons why we have
to default everything to Unicode; Even Europeans and Americans wouldn't
buy that idea so long as ISO-8859-1 is enough. So far the only
attractive feature for Unicode as external data format is when you need
more than three scripts in a single document. For most cases bilingual
just suffice thus "legacy encodings" suffice.
Dan the Man with Too Many Documents to Transcode
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jun 28 2002 - 18:01:08 EDT