In article <3E1D91B5.6090308@netscape.net>, dbkliv <dbkliv@netscape.net> wrote:
I'm curious what the problems are with representing French with Unicode (of whatever form).
I think there is no problem per se technically; in fact there are certain advantages (e.g., certain characters not available in the usual charset, e.g., "oe" in ISO-8859-1, are available in Unicode). But if everyone uses ISO-8859-1 on their computers, it would be unnecessary effort to convert everything to UTF-8 if ISO-8859-1 would be just fine. Also, I¢ don't know if people have UTF-8 editors. I¢ don't have one (actually I have one: Mozilla's Composer, although I'd prefer something more vi-like). If most people can edit UTF-8 files it may not be a problem. So my perceived "problem" is that it is not the dominant encoding. If French people have actually stopped using ISO-8859-1 and started using UTF-8, of course we should choose UTF-8.
The special French characters (é etc.) all fall into the first 256 characters of ASCII, and similarly of Unicode - at that low range, the two are nearly identical, aren't they?
Actually the ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 codes are very different. Of course, when you are using a Unicode-capable editor, you won't know that some French characters really consist of 2 octets per character in UTF-8. -- Ambrose Li <a.c.li@ieee.org> http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/cmcc/ http://www.cccgt.org/ DRM is theft - We are the stakeholders