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Re: [bug-gnulib] quote characters in stds
From: |
Bruno Haible |
Subject: |
Re: [bug-gnulib] quote characters in stds |
Date: |
Wed, 8 Jun 2005 14:04:07 +0200 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.5 |
Karl Berry wrote:
> Maybe you can reformulate the last two paragraphs in a way that is
> less incorrect?
>
> Sorry, since I do not see what is incorrect about them
The main point is that it transmits the perception that decent Unicode support
will take "a few years". Whereas it's there already now.
Five years ago, people made up lists of programs that _do_ work with UTF-8
encoded text files. Today, these programs are uncountable. Instead, people
make up lists of programs that _don't_ work with Unicode:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fBadSoftware
> My personal configuration is not the point (it's vm inside emacs).
This is the point: emacs (from HEAD branch, not the emacs-unicode-2 branch)
is the only noteworthy mailer that does not display Unicode adequately.
All the others (mozilla, kmail, evolution, mutt, pine) do by now.
> If you can suggest wording that makes you happier, please do.
My suggestion is to replace
Unicode contains the unambiguous quote characters required, and its
common encoding UTF-8 is upward compatible with address@hidden But Unicode
and UTF-8 are deployed even less widely than Latin1; it would be
premature to require Unicode support for running essentially every GNU
program.
Perhaps the prevailing situation will change in a few years, and then
we will revisit this.
with
Unicode contains the unambiguous quote characters required, and its
common encoding UTF-8 is upward compatible with address@hidden Unicode and
Latin1 are both wildly deployed and well supported. But there are
still environments which are dominated by Latin1, and still a
few applications work better with Latin1 than with Unicode. This is
likely to change over the next few years, though.
Bruno