RE: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Dec 01 2003 - 22:52:24 EST

  • Next message: Michael \(michka\) Kaplan: "Re: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?"

    Kenneth Whistler wrote:
    > > Oh God... Surrogates were standardized long before they started
    > > being used in Unicode 3.2 for new codepoint assignments out of
    > > the BMP...
    >
    > Actually, the first supplementary graphic characters were assigned for
    > Unicode 3.1. Unicode 3.2 added only BMP characters.

    You're right, I thought it was in 3.2 (but I had not really used Unicode
    3.1, and jumped directly from 3.0).

    > > It was clear that
    > > many new characters would become necessary in Unicode 3.0.0
    > > even if only Unicode 2.1.9 was published at that time.
    >
    > And Philippe is correct that the mechanism for surrogates (and
    > UTF-16) was published long ago. Actually, it was in Unicode 2.0
    > (July, 1996). And the ISO/IEC 10646-1 amendment upon which
    > UTF-16 was based was also approved and published in 1996.

    That far? So why isn't there correct support of UTF-16 on Windows
    95OSR2, 98, 98SE and ME (notably for their FAT32 filesystem)? I can
    understand it for Windows 95 and 95OSR1 as they were designed before,
    and may be also for the 95OSR2 version despite it was published in
    late 1997, one year after UTF-16 was published.

    > > So Windows 2000 should have had a full support of surrogates
    > > immediately
    >
    > Except then it probably would have been known as Windows 2003
    > instead of Windows 2000. :-)

    Still I cannot conceive that effectively Windows 2000 disables its
    support for UTF-16 and keeps on using UCS-2 only. This is still
    the case in Windows XP, and Media Center, and I wonder if this
    is still missing in the new Windows 2003 Server or in the next
    coming Windows 2003 workstations.

    How can Microsoft claim they support GB18030 in China in Windows
    XP, Media Center, or Windows 2003 then? Is this support restricted
    to only some APIs directly related to text presentation and handling
    for the GUI (like in GDI+ and UniScribe) but not enforced in more
    system APIs like the NTFS filesystem?

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