> > Yes, this is true. But then, why was such a wide ranging standard
> > imposed in the first place? What's the history here anyway? I get
>
> That should be bloody obvious. People - _all_ people - hate dealing with
> multiple character sets.
And prefer to deal with one huge, different from their own one? Or you
really mean "iso8859-1-native people hate to deal with
non-iso8859-1-compatible charsets"?
>
> > the impression that the standards body didn't have a broad enough
> > membership base. Thus, you have a few people trying to solve problems
>
> All the national standards organizations in the world, not broad enough?
> Ha.
Lie. No country ever developed Unicode as their national standard. Even US
and Germany didn't.
>
> Sort order is important. But cultural sort order (as opposed to any odd
> sort order) _cannot_ be done via naked byte order and picking the right
> character set. It's not even possible for English - you want to sort
>
> Andy
> boring
> John
>
> and no naked byte order will ever give you this.
You don't have a clue.
>
> > It is somewhat moot though. A standard that no one uses isn't a standard.
>
> Well, as Unicode is definitely used in Windows (95, NT - and, thus, by
> everyone using those systems), that doesn't seem to be a problem here.
> It's used all right.
Lie. Windows has unicode support that is mainly broken and unused -- this
is why it has "localized" versions (that will be absolutely pointless if
it was really internationalized like Unicode's use claims to make
possible).
> (No, it's not used _only_ by Windows, but that alone
> counts for a pretty large market segment.)
It's a wrong place to use the size of that market segment as an argument.
> > Another ugly part is, you don't know what encoding most FS's actually
> > use. That is, if you've got a file name on ext2fs, how do you know
> > how to convert it to UTF-8? Or an imported ufs disk? What if ext2fs
> > has some files in one encoding, and others in a different one?
>
> That's why you want to standardize those on UTF-8. You _don't_ want to
> have the FS have different names in different character sets.
Why do you know what others want? You don't even speak their languages.
-- Alex