Re: [tlug] UTF-8 for single-byte character sets

[Edward Middleton <edwardmiddleton@example.com>]

On Thu, 2003-01-16 at 00:13, Godwin Stewart wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I belong to several French language linux-related mailing lists, and one or
> two list members are being extremely obstinate in using UTF-8 to code French
> characters whereas everything we need is in the ISO-8859-15 set.
> 
> The mailer I use is Sylpheed, which doesn't understand UTF-8, so I get a
> load of BS in the middle of a word whenever an accent is used.
> 
> Am I right in insisting that there's no point in using UTF-8 for what can be
> perfectly well coded in a single-byte character set, or am I lagging behind
> the times? The people who post in UTF-8 insist that it's the way to go and
> that I'm stuck in the 18th century along with all the others who can't
> decode what they're sending.
> 
> Your opinions?
UTF-8 makes a lot of sense if you are coding for internationalization. 
Because it is actually possiable to represent most characters from most
languages in the unicode.  Try writting Japanese/french in the same
email and things become difficult any other way.  The problem is that
unicode for which utf-8 is an encoding, does not make a destinction
between Japanese and Chinese characters so without explicit marking
something as Chinese or Japanese it is impossiable to tell whether
Chinese or Japanese gliphs should be used.  You are however right that
it is mostly irrelevant if you are only writting emails in french.

-- 
Edward Middleton <edwardmiddleton@example.com>