Re: [xml-dev] nextml

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Thu, 2010-12-09 at 13:05 +0700, James Clark wrote:
> >
> >
> > It's also a common misconception that Unicode is a 16-bit character set;
> > it defines more than 65536 characters, and "surrogate pairs" in
> > languages like Java make utf16 as complex as utf8; processing characters
> > in either utf-8 or ucs-32 are the most common choices outside the Java
> > world as far as I can tell.
> >
> 
> UTF-16 is very common as an internal representation. Not just Java, also
> .NET, JavaScript, Windows, OS X, Symbian, IE, Mozilla, Opera,
> OpenOffice.org, Qt.

Oops, you are right of course, thanks for the correction.  I should
rather say,
    utf-8 and utf-16 are both very widely used; 32-bit representations
    are also in use.

(It's true that surrogate pairs introduce some of the complexities of
utf-8 processing into the utf-16 world, and that utf-16 isn't a cure-all
panacea, of course, but really the point was supposed to be that utf-16
is in widespread use and sticking to utf-8 only isn't a good idea. Boy
did I say that badly last time!)

Thanks,

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org