> You can't rewrite all existing legacy software to support encodings. You just can't. A backwards-compatible format was a huge catalyst for widely supporting Unicode in the first place.
Totally agree.
> What exactly are we delaying for decades?
Learning how encodings work and using that knowledge to write encoding-aware software.
> Engineers everywhere use Unicode today for new software. The battle has been won, moving forwards.
They do, but they're frequently foiled by on-disk encodings, filenames, internal string formats, network data, etc. etc. etc. All this stuff is outlined in TFA.
> And the vast majority of text isn't in computer code or even books. It's in the seemingly endless stream of content produced by journalists and social media each and every day
I concede I'm not likely to convince you here, but like, do you think Twitter is storing markup in their persistence layer? I doubt it. And even if there is some formatting, we're talking about <b> here, not huge amounts of angle brackets.
But think about any car display. That's probably not markup. Think about ATMs. Log files. Bank records. Court records. Label makers. Airport signage. Road signage. University presses.
Totally agree.
> What exactly are we delaying for decades?
Learning how encodings work and using that knowledge to write encoding-aware software.
> Engineers everywhere use Unicode today for new software. The battle has been won, moving forwards.
They do, but they're frequently foiled by on-disk encodings, filenames, internal string formats, network data, etc. etc. etc. All this stuff is outlined in TFA.
> And the vast majority of text isn't in computer code or even books. It's in the seemingly endless stream of content produced by journalists and social media each and every day
I concede I'm not likely to convince you here, but like, do you think Twitter is storing markup in their persistence layer? I doubt it. And even if there is some formatting, we're talking about <b> here, not huge amounts of angle brackets.
But think about any car display. That's probably not markup. Think about ATMs. Log files. Bank records. Court records. Label makers. Airport signage. Road signage. University presses.