From: Yohanes Santoso Date: 2003-01-29T05:38:49+09:00 Subject: Re: euc-jp coding of ruby talk web interface Rudolf Polzer writes: > So why choose EUC-JP over UTF-8 then? Familiarity, habit, and the lack of compelling incentives to switch. Probably the user of any locale-specific encoding would remember some commonly used values, just like people who use the ASCII encoding would remember that 'A' is encoded as the number 65. If there is a new ASCII-like standard, we (users of the ASCII encoding) probably would also be as hesitant or inconvenienced to switch as users of locale-specific encoding. Characteristic differences between locale-specific character sets and the Unicode would also cause some people to delay switching, e.g. an ASCII user would probably be hesitant if the new ASCII-like standard does not conserve this property: '9'-'0'==9. > Is it different with EUC-JP vs. iso-2022-jp? > Or are these just different encodings for the same character set and > only the numbers are encoded differently? Conversion between encodings that can be used to represent the same character sets is rather painless as it can be achieved by simply performing some linear transformations. I am not sure if this is always true, but so far, my experience has not shown me otherwise. For example, iso-2022-jp -> EUC-JP == encoded value + 128, and EUC-JP -> iso-2022-jp is encoded value - 128 (I looked up the transformation formulae from somewhere, as it is not something that I usually bother to remember). > Since I haven't seen a web browser written in Ruby yet: why is that > a reason for the website to choose EUC-JP? Perhaps some author's favourite tools (editor, fonts, information processing tools (spell checker, search engines), etc.) are still non UTF-8 enabled. But what I suspect most is "old habits are difficult to break". YS.