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

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Danilo Segan wrote:

> 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.
>

beast is using UTF-8 ever since gtk moved to it (and beast was one of the
first programs ported to gtk+ 2.0).
as for the ChangeLog, NEWS and README, those simply ascii, and that won't
change until debian ships with an UTF-8 capable emacs which i'm desperately
waiting for.

> 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.
>

i don't actually have a clue about the charsets we use on the website,
which is why i'm Cc:-ing Alper Ersoy here, the beast website maintainer
and texitheque (the doc system used by beast) maintainer.
alper, is there a reason the html files are in ISO-8859-1 and not UTF-8,
and can you switch that?

> 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
>
>

---
ciaoTJ