UTF-8 vs UTF-16...? (Was: Feeling good about SML)

[Tim Bray]

At 06:04 AM 11/17/99 -0500, James Tauber wrote:
>UTF-16, however, only gives access to the equivalent of Unicode with the
>surrogate extension mechanism, ie the first 17 planes of the UCS.

Right, a mere million extra characters in excess of what we're using now.

This feels like a pretty low-risk option to me.  

In terms of actual usability, there's effectively no difference between
UTF-16 and UTF-8.  UTF-16 seems to be an easier sell in Japan for reasons
that I've not fully understood.

What's really happening, near as I can tell, is that C programmers use
UTF-8 and Java programmers use UTF-16, regardless of where they're from.

Fortunately, this particular conversion is easy and requires no tables. -T.

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