Quoteing ned+ietf-822(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com, on Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at
08:03:02PM -0800:
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
Why?
I suppose the reason was to have something that is backwards compatible with
existing, widely used multibyte encodings for simplified Chinese. I've heard
GB18080 referred to as UTF-GBK on occasion.
But I'm really not the right person to ask about this. As Russ already pointed
out, the entire charset space is hugely political. And I'm not privy to the
political discussions that led to this being done. I just happened to have had
to write code to support the outcome.
Ned