Re: window caption and utf

[jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys)]

> From: Matthias Ettrich <ettrich@troll.no>
> Resent-From: wm-spec-list@gnome.org
> Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 19:11:05 +0200
> To: wm-spec-list@gnome.org
> Subject: window caption and utf
> -----
> Hi,
> 
> one more extension to the spec. Unfortunately, X defines the XA_WM_NAME to be
> in "portable host encoding". This is a pre-unicode concept, not well thought
> through and AFAIK never really implemented.

Well, Unicode was still a glimmer in people's eyes in 1988...  Sigh...

> 
> I assume most WMs currently interpret the WM_NAME according to the local
> encoding of the WM. This still has to be supported, I suppose many old apps
> rely on that.
> 
> New applications, however, want, should and have to use unicode for the window
> captions. Otherwise it's not possible to have for example norwegian
> applications together with some corean or japanese ones on the same screen.
> 
> I therefore suggest we add an additional _NET_WM_NAME property which is
> defined
> to be in utf8 or utf16 encoding (whatever you prefer, utf8 would be fine for
> me). This way old apps stay compatible with new window managers and new apps
> will work fine with old window managers.
> 
I suspect alot of places where X uses "ascii" or ISO-LATIN-1 could be 
safely replaced with UTF-8 without bad things happening.  UTF-16 is a 
very different animal, and I believe is not useful for this purpose.  
In any case, I expect looking into where UTF-8 can be used should be looked 
into carefully; it may provide alot of bang for the buck...

				- Jim Gettys