Re: [EWMH] _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_AUXILIARY

[Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas mailhot laposte net>]

Le jeudi 18 octobre 2007 �8:31 +0000, Tuomo Valkonen a �it :
> On 2007-10-18, Russell Shaw <rjshaw netspace net au> wrote:
> > I find it hard to see those problems because i rarely handle non-english
> > text.
> 
> Which problems? The ones with present abstraction implementations
> (wchar_t, locale), or the general unknown encoding fuckup?

The general unknown encoding fuckup is file formats do not specify
encodings, filesystems do not specify encodings, C primitives do not
specify encodings, english speakers do not care and will just use
defaults (and the software industry is US-centered), etc

You can rave all you want things should be nicely tagged with encodings
but they aren't and won't be till an awful lot of otherwise perfectly
working code is rewritten.

So the next best thing is a good universal default. Which UTF-8 is. So
live with it (or join unicode.org to get it improved).

The single best feature of XML was not making possible to tag stuff with
encodings (HTML had it before, as SGML). The single best feature of XML
was to select UTF-8 as default encoding, so stuff is internationalised
by default.

Before people would assume random mixes of windows US encoding,
iso-8859-1, US-ASCII, local encoding, and tag their files with something
else. NO ONE used nor uses ISO-8859-15 even though one of the symbols it
is required for (the euro) is one of the most used currencies in the
world. If UTF-8 had not spread and apps were not special-casing euro for
all the documents that pretend to be iso-8859-1 stuff would be broken
all over the place. And you know what? Situation for scripts that do not
have the first or second world economy behind them is worse.

So it's fun to shot at UTF-8. UTF-8 is ugly. UTF-8 reeks of compromise.
But UTF-8 works which was not the case of all the solutions UTF-8 haters
dreamed before and still cling to.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot