Re: [EWMH] _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_AUXILIARY

["Nicolas Mailhot" <nicolas mailhot laposte net>]

Tuomo,

You're advocating a lot of code churn and backwards-incompatible
changes for what? There is no practical alternative encoding to UTF-8
today. Do you really think people are going to change and rewrite all
the huge existing code base just in case some hypothetical alternative
to UTF-8 emerges one day? (and make no mistake, new code reuses old
code so changing only new code to take encoding into account is
useless)

No one but developers having to deal with unicode complexities mourn
the pile of pre-unicode encoding standards. They didn't work. With or
without encoding tagging. They sort-of worked with single-language
single-script users that never communicated with people outside their
language bubble but that's not what people needed 50 years ago and
that's even less what they need today (globalized world, remember?).
They are not a credible alternative to unicode, never been and never
will be.

And no one is working on a unicode alternative today. Even if someone
was it took decades for the unicode consortium to arrive at the state
you complain of. This is gigantic work. Unicode.org happened because
an international encoding was sorely needed, now there is one (not
pretty but good enough and getting better) I don't seen anyone
investing the same decades of work in something that may or may not
end up less quirky.

If you don't like the unicode consortium choices, and are not willing
to rectify them from within this organisation, found your alternative
organisation and propose a workable alternative to UTF-8. And then
people may see the usefulness of not targeting an unicode monoculture.

But as long as there is effectively a single working international
encoding standard in the world, people will target it exclusively, and
that's not because they are dumb that's because they have other things
on their plate than preparing for something that may or may not happen
in their lifetime. It's totally useless to complain at them unless you
have a workable UTF-8 alternative hidden in your pocket.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot