At 20:56 03/09/22 +0900, MURATA Makoto wrote:
On 21 Sep 2003 22:06:30 -0500
"Aaron Swartz" <me(_at_)aaronsw(_dot_)com> wrote:
> > I think that persuading users is more difficult than
> > persuading programmers. I have encouraged use of Unicode
> > for XML in Japan, but nothing has happened.
>
> The users shouldn't have to know what a character encoding is! Their
> software should just use UTF-8 automatically.
Will users discard existing software, which supports legacy encogins, and
existing data, which are in legacy encodings? I am not saying Unicode
everywhere is bad. To the contrary, I think Unicode everywhere is better.
But it is extremely unlikely.
New versions of software in many cases supports Unicode. As users
upgrade, they will be more and more able to use Unicode. XML made
a big step forward by defining UTF-8 and UTF-16 as default encodings
required to be understood by the parser. This is helping getting
software upgraded.
At the next step, some formats may decide to rely even more on Unicode
(such as N3). So we are moving in the right direction, slower than
we would like, but moving nonetheless. Data will move less quickly
than software, that has always been the case. In the short time,
many things seem extremely unlikely. But in the long run, we will
get closer.
Regards, Martin.