On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 03:39:53AM +0200, Christian Rose <menthos@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Native support for UTF-8 is uncommon and of course that is bad and
Sorry? my mailer supports it (mutt) my editor supports it (vim), my terminal
supports it (xterm), my irc-client supports it (epic), my browser(s) suipport
it (lynx, netscape, mozilla), my os supports it on the console (linux)...
utf-8 support is more common than supprot for most other charsets,
actually.
> Editors aside, simply looking at and otherwise using console text tools
> on UTF-8 files with non-ASCII content, usually has little if any
> support.
The same is true for anythign except ascii. Hint: you cannot represrnt the
majority of languages with ascii.
(and I was told emacs can do utf-8. at least people found a way to decode
my mails properly in emacs). Maybe it's just that emacs can't natively
edit utf-8 text, but it should be possible to just convert it to some
native charset. every unix comes with iconv, and most do support utf-8 for
example.
> I'm sure you'll find out many other surprises when you check what text
> tools in any major GNU/Linux distribution actually fully supports UTF-8,
I'd say the majority does.
> Sure the tools need to get updated in the end, but it's a very slow
> process that has already taken years with little happening and surely
> many years remain to come
I realyl think you need a reality check.
> have to use UTF-8 is a big practical problem for translators. Note that
s/big/little/ every editor should eb able to pipe through some
external program (iconv -f utf-8 -t koi8-r for russian for example) on
loading/saving. And I am quite sure translators for non-ascii languages
already know how to cope with charset problems - they needed to.
> That still won't solve the problems:
(agreed to all of them - i wa spurely concerned about utf-8 ;)
> > While I do agree with Marc that XML is not the all-purpose solution I
> > really think it's going to help in the case of localisation by the
> > consistent use of UTF-8 and other concepts like includeable files and
> > overrideable tags.
XML and UTF-8 are two completely orthogonal concepts - xml is represented
in unicode and can be written in almost any encoding (ascii, viscii,
whatever).
I don't see any problem having multiple different(!) files with different
encodings, pleasing whatever a local translator likes.
--
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