| Unicode support (was: UTF-8 charset) [message #180857 is a reply to message #180856] |
Fri, 22 March 2013 01:16   |
Thomas 'PointedEars'
Messages: 701
Registered: October 2010
Karma:
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Senior Member |
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Christoph Becker wrote:
> Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
>>> Am 21.03.2013 15:31, schrieb Adrian Tuddenham:
>>>> There are some computers that cannot read UTF-8.
>>
>> That would be computers and software older than 30 years now. The
>> Unicode Standard, version 2.0, and UTF-8, one the encodings for the
>> character set thus specified, was published in 1992 CE. All reasonably
>> modern operating systems, in effect all commonly used ones, support
>> Unicode and provide Unicode-capable fonts. Many have made a Unicode
>> encoding their default encoding; for example, NTFS encodes filenames
>> using UTF-16, and UTF-8 has been the default locale encoding on GNU/Linux
>> systems for several years now.
>
> I recently read, that UTF-8 is not available on many Windows PCs in
> Taiwan, where `BIG5' is still prevalent, what would be very unfortunate.
I would like to see proof of that. While possible, I consider it unlikely.
Taiwan is especially intertwined with the Western world (being the location
of major local hardware manufacturers, and major foreign investments on the
doorstep to mainland China), and Traditional Chinese as written in Taiwan
was one of the first scripts to be covered by Unicode, with CJK Unified
Ideographs, in 1992.
Windows has been supporting Unicode, and came pre-installed with Unicode-
capable fonts since Windows NT (and so, Windows 2000). Did not Windows XP
support end last year?
> OTOH restricting oneself to ASCII on Usenet reminds me of offering full
> support for IE 6 on the Web (e.g. by using GIFs instead PNGs when
> transparency is required), which IMO holds back reasonable innovation.
ACK.
>> Thus, a major criticism of PHP is that as of version 5.4 it still has no
>> native Unicode support, while other popular programming languages on the
>> Web, like ECMAScript implementations and Python, have.
>
> Indeed, that's a shame and rather painful for developers. And if I'm
> not mistaken, the situation won't change with PHP 5.5. :(
That would be a pity. Native Unicode support was announced for PHP 6 before
those plans were abandoned. I wonder, what can be that hard in implementing
it? Apparently even Perl managed the transition years ago although it
requires a few extra lines per script.
PointedEars
--
Prototype.js was written by people who don't know javascript for people
who don't know javascript. People who don't know javascript are not
the best source of advice on designing systems that use javascript.
-- Richard Cornford, cljs, <f806at$ail$1$8300dec7(at)news(dot)demon(dot)co(dot)uk>
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