Re: [EWMH] _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_AUXILIARY

[Tuomo Valkonen <tuomov iki fi>]

On 2007-10-18, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas mailhot laposte net> wrote:
> 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.

The big problem is that _new_ code is being written specifically
for a monoculture; old code simply didn't care.

> 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).

That's just another reason why it's pointless to bear with FOSS, as it
can do nothing better than the commercial OSes. 

> 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.

Most of the XML files I've seen include a specification of the encoding.

> 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.

Actually, UTF-8 as an ASCII-compatible mapping from 32-bit numbers to
8-bit sequences is beautiful, something that can not be said of most
other multibyte encodings. However, Unicode or ISO-10646 or whatever
they want to call the character mapping in the background, is extremely
ugly.

-- 
Tuomo