Re: HELO
2002-02-21 10:05:41
1) How is this different from -unicode?
This list isn't specifically about Unicode, although it is a topic
which should
surely come up quite a bit.
G11n/i18n encompass a lot more than Unicode. "Unicode is not enough".
The gist being that to inter-operate with the myriad of systems in the
world, an application must understand the encodings, time zones, and
locality preferences for a location. By "preferences" here I don't mean
application user preferences, I mean the manners by which a user in a
location may prefer to use the application.
Unicode may be enough in a system which needn't operate with a
non-Unicode system, by this seems unlikely in Perl's case, since the
moment the app hits the web, it is interacting with web browsers.
Globalization is made significantly easier if Unicode is made standard
throughout the application itself, so that all processing/object
interaction/transformation/etc. is happening in Unicode. Application
layers which interact with users, services, or other systems, however,
must understand non-Unicode if those users/services/systems user other
encodings. This is the "Application Encoding Sandwich", having the
innards all speaking strictly Unicode, and the 'outards' being
responsible to get their data into Unicode. The outards can end up
pretty complicated in this scenario, since in many cases they need to do
much more than convert encodings. Consider e-mail, where non-ASCII
headers get base64 or qprint encoded, and in some cases don't even
identify their own encodings.
Globalization is an appropriate title for the effort, since you quickly
get the feeling you are solving the world's problems. :-) If only
Unicode were universally adapted ...
- Dan
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