On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 05:00:53AM +0200, s. keeling wrote: > Eduardo M KALINOWSKI <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > s. keeling wrote: > > > Dotan Cohen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > > > >> Why are you against switching to UTF-8? Disk space? There really is > > > > > > Why would I be _for_ switching? I'm a unilingual [Anglophone]. utf-8 > > > > Even if you used a language with a few accented characters (French, > > Spanish, Polish, etc.), your files would only change with regards to > > those characters (which would take 2 instead of one byte - but you could > > have French and Polish in the same file, for example). The difference is > > minimal, and, for English only, inexistent. > > I'm still wondering where the argument _for_ this is. I'm doing > Anglaise and nothing else, and you can easily handle that there. > Rhetorical, but why would I want to go utf-8? I can see little point > in it in my situation. Here is an argument for you: using ascii is delaying the adoption of utf-8.
Let me elaborate. Romanian is using a few special characters (a,i,s and t with diacritics) which are only available in utf-8 (and maybe iso-8852-16?). To make things worse, MS implemented the wrong characters (from iso-8852-2) up to XP and only corrected this in Vista (and a recent update for XP). Right now we have the following situation: some people use the special characters when writing, but they mostly use the wrong ones. Others (the majority) don't use them at all (making Romanian texts difficult to read, because without the diacritics many words look the same) because it's too much trouble. Even if you configure your own computer to show them right, you never know what other people are using. Switching everybody to utf-8 would be the best and simplest solution. Regards, Andrei -- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)
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