Dan Oscarsson, Sweden writes:
What we need is an encoding that is "file-system safe" and represents the
printable characters in ISO 8859-1 and a few of the most common control
characters as them selves (one octet apiece). This would make both old
ascii files and newer (now fairely common) ISO 8859-1 files to be
used without change.
For those of you that also read Usenet's comp.std.internat, this is
exactly the sentiment that I was referring to, where everybody and his
pet rat (just *love* that phrase :-) wants to use his own little
encoding as the basis for any multilingual extensions.
I think (currently :-) that getting everybody to use a *single*
Unicode-based encoding for email and/or netnews on a *daily* basis is
about as likely as getting everybody to speak Esperanto fluently by
the turn of the millenium.
On the other hand, perhaps a better analogy for Unicode is English,
which, though it has not become a universal language, has just about
become a universal *second* language.
There's no doubt in my mind that Unicode will happen. Unicode is the
MS-DOS of charsets. It is more a question of *how* it will happen.
Sigh, I should get back to my *work*.
Cheers,
Erik