[tlug] Big5 Vs. Unicode Vs. Netscape 4.x Vs. deadline

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

Let me present you with a hypothetical situation.

I disavow any association with it except for having
recently hypothetically stepped into a sort of hypothetical
rescue-kibitzer role.

A company developed a database-backed intranet for a certain
other, large company's office in a rather prosperous part of
China.  The initial development was in English and now a Chinese
translation is being done.  The programmer working on this
created the Chinese-language entries in the database in 
Unicode.

Today, she learned some interesting facts:

1) Netscape 4 doesn't support Unicode;

2) 90%+ of the customer's staff are using Netscape 4.
   Telling them to upgrade is out of the question.

The site is using JBoss and Apache for Windows, along with
some Other Company's database.

Her options at this point would seem to be:

1) Write or find a servlet that will convert the Unicode
   in the database to Big5 on the fly;

2) Throw all caution to the wind and convert the entire
   database to Unicode and be done with it.

Oh, and did I mention that the project due date is Friday, so
she's expected to have it in the customer's hands on Thursday so
they can start checking it before the weekend?

No milestone versions or betas have been done at all.  Like I
said, I disavow all association with that hypothetical project.

I also hypothetically advised her that she really needs to
have a good input filter to make sure that whatever the
customer's staff input to the database, it is converted to 
Unicode or whatever else the database ends up finally using,
since otherwise your database will doubtless quickly fill with
all sorts of crap.

She seems a bit too young to know about ugly old browsers and
a bit thin on knowledge of the pitfalls of mutli-byte platforms
issues.

So, my question to you good people (and BOFHs :-) is, "What would
you advise her to do?  I'm sort of leaning toward solution 2, plus
the input filter (of course), since the customer has thousands
of employees and all of that outbound conversion could lead to
significantly elevated server loads that they haven't planned
on or budgeted for.  On the other hand, keeping the database in
Unicode is probably a cleaner solution.


TIA,
Jonathan