[Gnome-print] Re: [jody: [ynakai@redhat.com: Re: Gnumeric bug 15607]]

[Yukihiro Nakai <ynakai redhat com>]

On 22 Nov 2000 21:54:56 -0200
Lauris Kaplinski <lauris@helixcode.com> wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> I consider it very bad idea, to accept current miserable locale/encoding
> scheme at all.
> Instead we should:
> 1) Use only utf-8 strings in application code
> 2) Collect all input/output related code to single place (like EFonts
> are in gal), where it can be dealt in systematic way.

OK, you're saying to use utf-8 only internally, and keep input/output
to be still traditional coding? I'm agree to it, though it is MS Windows' way.

> The current de-facto system of locale-specific encodings is way too
> error-prone. To make is waterproof, one should include encoding tag
> with every string passed in system - which results in much-much more
> inconveniece than using utf-8 everywhere.
> How can application know, what given character code really means? How
> to determine, whether it is in iso-8859-1, koi-8 BIG-5 or whatever
> encoding? You shouldn't force people using only 1-2 languages in
> their documents - and what is even worse - you shouldn't expect that
> received document is written in the same locale, where the reader
> happens to be.
> 
> Locales/encoding are EVIL. They have to be replaced by languages/unicode
> ASAP - and I think it is better to introduce major short-term pain,
> that to make people suffer forever. The situation is bad enough, that
> people browsers, mailreaders etc. have to support silly encodings
> forever - better to not generate more such unhappy applications.

Unicode(in the future) is good, but utf-8 is very EVIL. Japanese, Chinese
and Taiwanese(Chinese in Taiwan) use many same characters in different glyphs.
But utf-8 ignores that. Utf-8 maps one character in one glyph. So utf-8
ignores and breaks our each culture, that's the point. Japanese and English
may be in one utf-8 document, but Japanese and Chinese can't be in one utf-8
document. Please don't think utf-8 is complete.

Even if utf-8 becomes to be a standard in Linux/Unix, we'll still use lang-depend
utf-8 locale. Such as ja_JP.UTF-8, zh_CN.UTF-8, zh_TW.UTF-8. 

There should be a mime header including charset in documents, and applications
should see that.

We know we should move to the Unicode world with utf-8 locales ASAP, but can
never move so soon as single people do. There is many many non-GNOME apps and
system in our Linux distro and Linux box , and almost of all are still not
ready for utf-8. It will take more than 2 or 3 years for us to be ready for utf-8,
but we can't use GNOME until that if GNOME is such too optimized to utf-8.
People will not use GNOME, and also Linux for years!

I think it's one of the good feature that all new and old can co-exist in GNOME.
We can see, create and remove files from legacy terminals with legacy command,
also from gmc. They don't conflict.

So, we don't want you to ignore our legacy locales/encoding at least more 2 or
3 years...

---
Yukihior Nakai, Red Hat Japan, Development.