Re: Msdos name alias patch for 2.1.48

Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl
Tue, 12 Aug 1997 23:21:26 +0200 (MET DST)


Andrew E. Mileski:

:: > The OSTA-UDF(tm) filesystem I'm working on supports compressed Unicode.
:: > Basically, the first byte is a flag inidcating how to expand the following
:: > bytes:
:: > 8 = high byte is 0 and low byte is from data stream
:: > 16 = high byte is followed by low byte in the data stream
:: > By the ISO standards, this is CS0 or a character set defined by agreement.
::
:: Not yet another Unicode encoding format?! What's wrong with
:: UTF-8? Not Invented Here?

: UTF-8 maps Unicode to a font as Unicode does not specify how a character
: appears, but rather Unicode differentiates characters from each other.

Strange for someone who works on Unicode not to know
what UTF-8 is. It is a variable length byte encoding
for Unicode (and similar codes, like ISO 10646), with the property
that the ASCII subset of Unicode is mapped with the usual single-byte
values, while these ASCII bytes, in particular NUL and '/', cannot
be part of the multi-byte representation of other Unicode values.
Details can be found in the keyboard and console drivers.

Note that as a consequence each ASCII file, like this message,
is also a UTF-8-coded Unicode file.

UTF-8 has nothing to do with fonts or display. It is just
a way of representing the bits.

Andries