[TxMt] NEED Japanese Text Encoding! (pretty please?)

[Sean Schertell]

>> I am almost positive it won't happen; you can use external tools  
>> such as iconv or similar to convert to/from instead. The best  
>> would be to use UTF-8 on those web pages of course.
>>
>
> UTF-8 sucks for Japanese and Chinese texts mainly due to space  
> reasons. If anything makes sense, then it is UTF-16, which Textmate  
> also supports.
>
> Apart from that, it seems that Unicode is not actually able to  
> handle 100% of Chinese (and maybe also Japanese) script. But I'm  
> not a Unicode expert.

Could you explain what you mean by "space reasons"?

Also, does anyone else have any experience using UTF-8 for Japanese  
web pages?  It seems that none of the major Japanese sites use it  
(they mostly use Shift-JIS).  I tried to use it once but discovered  
that Mac IE 5 rendered form elements such as pull down lists and  
buttons as "mojibake" (garbage characters).  Maybe there's a  
workaround for that?

If anyone has success stories with Japanese UTF-8, I'd love to hear  
them.  I certainly don't have any personal qualms about leaving Shift- 
JIS behind -- as long as I know UTF-8 is viable for commercial  
Japanese web sites.

Sean


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