Re: [EWMH] _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_AUXILIARY

[Tuomo Valkonen <tuomov iki fi>]

On 2007-10-18, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas mailhot laposte net> wrote:
>
> Le jeudi 18 octobre 2007 à 18:31 +0000, Tuomo Valkonen a écrit :
>> 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.
>


-- 
Tuomo