OT: Unicode and UTF-8 avoided? (was Re: Please translate beast and bse)

[Danilo Segan <dsegan gmx net>]

Hi Tim,

Дана четвртак, 16. октобар 2003. 19:53:08 CEST, Tim Janik написа:
>
> (hoever i've had to change your last name in the toplevel
> ChangeLog, so our doc tools still work with it)

Apart from your mailer wrongly assuming my message was in ISO-8859-1,  
this is another argument to start using UTF-8.

Gnome is doing a good job here, and this is a great chance to show your  
understanding of I18N issues: it is much harder to do properly without  
Unicode support, and UTF-8 is the best way to do it in terms of "null- 
strings safe".

It's step backwards to depart from UTF-8, when major improvements in  
Gtk+2 and Gnome2 are exactly there where UTF-8 counts. Insisting on  
UTF-8 was no accident.

On the other hand, since your web page is also given with charset ISO- 
8859-1, you might want to use SGML numeric entities in HTML to get any  
of the symbols from Unicode repertoire: see http://www.gnome.org/i18n/  
for example how it's done.


I don't mean anything nasty, but the only way to do it right, is to do  
it once, and make it work for everyone. The only way to set things  
straight is to start switching from 8-bit encodings to UTF-8  
*everywhere*.

So, *please* use UTF-8 whenever you need anything other than ASCII. In  
other cases, you're already using UTF-8, because it's ASCII  
compatible ;-)

But I definitely do not see any reason to have page  
http://beast.gtk.org/release-news.html be in 'charset: ISO-8859-1',  
when it seems to be all ASCII. Make it 'UTF-8', and when someone has to  
enter a name on it, he'll be able to do it without worrying if his name  
will become corrupted or not.

And you lose nothing and gain nothing (immediately), but at least you  
signal support for the good cause ;-)


As a sidenote, I'm disappointed that the web, once the symbol of multi- 
lingual culture, is the last to transfer to the multi-lingual encoding  
like UTF-8. Client side programs, otoh, are all well equipped (look at  
Gnome, even KDE which I don't mention very often ;).

Of course, all of this is just a suggestion with good intentions. I'm  
not particularly offended with my name being transformed (huh, I even  
do it myself :-), but I hope that one day I'll be able even to type it  
completely (perhaps even using cyrillic script), so this is a minor  
contribution to that goal. :-)

Cheers,
Danilo