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Someone in the past must have invented a wide encoding unlike the popular transition format. I wonder if using that for some use cases would have been less pai
by wyldfire 7y ago
Someone in the past must have invented a wide encoding unlike the popular transition format. I wonder if using that for some use cases would have been less pain because it would remove the whack-a-mole symptom: nothing would work at all until you did all the work to consume/transcode as appropriate.
I suppose it's moot at this point.
- hprotagonist 7y agoThe problem, which is always the problem, is that like 12 someones invented different wide encodings at many times in the past. The result is the chaos of the present day.
- wyldfire 7y agoI don't think today's chaos is related to other wide encodings (those are probably very rarely used). Today's chaos is like Batchelder describes, but I'm suggesting that some of that is due to the ambiguity of the encoding: is this data I'm consuming iso-8859-x or is it utf-8? It's this ambiguity that contributes to the whack-a-mole (and this is a big part of the chaos IMO). That said, would anyone have been interested in a totally new encoding? For European languages which use mostly the same 26 latin characters with occasional diacritics and accents, UTF-8-with-incompatible-consumer degrades into occasional unreadable characters. But if your out-of-date browser or application gave you a "cannot decode this encoding" error, that might have caused a whole lot of pain during that transition. Not to mention that some of the same issues with OS/filesystem/language library interaction would probably remain.