[fpc-devel] Trying to understand the wiki-Page "FPC Unicodesupport"

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Marco van de Voort schrieb:
> In our previous episode, Hans-Peter Diettrich said:
>> While it certainly is a stupid (Microsoft) idea to use UTF-16 for file 
>> storage, we'll have to take that into account.
> 
> (16-bit codepages were designed into OS/2 and Windows NT before utf-8 even
> existed)

Right, both systems were developed by Microsoft :-]

No problem, as long as proper host/network byteorder conversion is 
applied in reading/writing such files. But in former times every 
computer manufacturer was proud of *his* clever text processing 
features, with characters stored in 6 up to 9 bit registers. In those 
times it was an essential *marketing* feature, when files could *not* be 
read by competing systems, due to different bytesize, bit-/byteorder, 
character sets, file formats etc.

But times have changed, nowadays the Internet requires certain common 
standards (e.g. 8-bit bytes = octets, HTML, Unicode and more), which 
allow for data exchange across machine and country boundaries.

The lack of far-east support already forced the Japanese to invent their 
own BIOS, codepages etc.  Nowadays continued use of UCS2 had forced the 
Chinese to invent their own character encoding, which then would be used 
by more people than UCS2. Guess what would happen to the rest of the 
world, then...

<OT>
Or will the Chinese government enforce such a development soon, to 
eliminate the need for continued censorship of foreign web pages, 
because legal equipment then only could present genuine Chinese pages, 
but no more HTML, JavaScript and Unicode? How would the official Chinese 
programming language look like?
</OT>

DoDi