RE: Unicode in Asia Question

From: Carl W. Brown (cbrown@xnetinc.com)
Date: Wed Aug 01 2001 - 16:57:20 EDT


Danny,

I am currently working on xIUA. This is sample code that you can integrate
into you application to help you interface to ICU.
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/

It has added functionality specifically tailored for Web servers. It will
allow you to develop application Unicode that will dynamically switch
between code page, UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 with the same object code. It
also has special Web support functions such as routines to find locale names
in paths or process the accept language values. It even has a couple of
special Apache features such as running as an Apaches extension and
optionally providing mime services that will override mod_mime with a
directory path based language selection system.

With this code you can provide utf-8 to 5.0 and above browsers and code page
to older browsers with the same code.

It also provides a cross platform thread safe locale manager that makes
converting existing code to use multiple locales easy. It even has limited
multiple locale support. I can have one locale for my HTML pages such as
"ja_JP.EUC-JP" and my browser might use "ja_JP.Shift_JIS". One call
converts the data. If the browser uses "ja_JP.UTF-8" the same call converts
it properly. If the browser is using "ja_JP.EUC-JP" then the data is just
copied.

The xIUA code is free open source code that I developed pro-bono to help
people convert to Unicode.

Carl

> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
> Behalf Of Magda Danish (Unicode)
> Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2001 10:34 AM
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: FW: Unicode in Asia Question
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: NORIEGA,DANNY (A-HongKong,ex1) [mailto:danny_noriega@agilent.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2001 2:56 AM
> To: 'info@unicode.org'
> Subject: Unicode in Asia Question
>
>
> Hi:
>
> My company is planning to implement 16-bit Unicode. The proposal is to
> go strictly and solely with Unicode (16 bit Unicode for Asia/Japan).
>
> Up to this point we have specified the following encodings:
> - Big 5 (Traditional Chinese)
> - GB 2312 (Simplified Chinese)
> - Shift - JIS (Japanese)
> - KSC 5601 1967 (Korean)
> - Iso-8859-1 (Western character sets)
> - Unicode (we believe this is used for Russian)
>
> I do not fully understand the need for the various encodings. I believe
> there are local preferences for browsers (vendors, versions, plugins,
> etc.) that are related to encoding. I have also heard there is some
> need, in Japan for example, where web users routinely view the HTML
> source and expect Shift-JIS.
>
> Can you confirm what browser preferences (encoding driven) are user
> musts? By this I mean IE 4.0+, Netscape, Mosiac, KK Man & etc.. And,
> what are the customer needs that would make an specific encoding
> (Unicode, Big 5, GB 2312 or KSC 5601 1967) a must?
>
> The basic question I'm trying to answer is if we move forward with using
> strictly Unicode, will my customers in Asia be adversely affected by
> this decsion? Will they not be able to view content I place on my
> website.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Danny Noriega
> Asia eBusiness Manager
> Agilent Technologies Hong Kong Ltd.
> danny_noriega@agilent.com
>



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