The majority of folks on USEFOR also seem to me to have bought
wholeheartedly into the concept of Unicode and the belief that Unicode
will displace all other character sets in the near future, that all
software will soon expect any untagged 8-bit data to be in Unicode, and
that handling Unicode is all that's necessary to move forward into the
non-ASCII world.
Well it seems that Microsoft have bought into Unicode pretty thoroughly,
and that may well be the determining factor. Much as it grieves me to
admit it, this may be one thing that Microsoft did right.
The fact that the Windows OS offers native Unicode support through various APIs
doesn't mean all applications on Windows handle Unicode well if at all. Nor
does the presence of APIs that handle UTF-16 automatically translate into
support for UTF-8.
And even if the presence of Unicode support in Windows did mean all
applications on Windows handled Unicode well, this doesn't translate into
everyone starting to use Unicode encodings on the wire.
OTOH, one hears rumours that the Chinese are not altogether happy.
Hardly a rumor. The Chinese dislike Unicode, or perhaps more accurately the
UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings of Unicode, sufficiently to have defined a new
charset called GB18030 that is backwards compatible with GBK and GB2312 but can
handle the full Unicode repetoire as well. And it is my understanding that
there may come a day where GB18030 support will be required in order to sell
some software in China.
Writing code to support GB18030 isn't fun at all. I know; I've done it.
Ned