[AccessD] Internationalization, Unicode and Character Sets

Jim Lawrence (AccessD) accessd at shaw.ca
Sat Oct 11 13:13:54 CDT 2003


Hi Gustav:

<rant mode on>
Eight months ago, I was brought into a project that required English and
Japanese. In addition to this the client had kindly bought a full shopping
cart and affiliate program written in Perl. My job was simply to design the
graphical front-end for a web site. The front end was fairly simple but
attention had to be paid to the back-end.

We had difficulty getting the ISP to upgrade to Perl version 5.x, so that it
would recognize encoding. The package was finally completed but for one
outstanding set of issues. The designer of the Perl code did not use a SQL
back-end but some kind of flat-base filing system. English worked fine but
there was no way I could get the Japanese to work, period. None of the Perl
sorting or importing routines worked right, not without a complete re-write.

The current project is now on hold. We did finally move the project to a PHP
and SQL back-end arrangement. No-one I know can get the thing resurrected,
it is so far over budget and I am simply out of time and patience.

In the future, when someone comes to me with a UTF-8 project the price will
be triple and that will be after I have under gone a complete mental
examination.
<rant mode off>

...and that is my two cents worth.
Jim

PS That is a great article/site on Unicode and character sets. :-)

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Gustav Brock
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 2:07 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: [AccessD] Internationalization, Unicode and Character Sets


Hi all

Joel Spolsky has some comments on PHP, internationalization, Unicode
and character sets.

/gustav

---

From: Joel On Software <fogcreek at whatcounts.com>
Date: Saturday, October 11, 2003, 1:47:53 AM
Subject: [JoelOnSoftware] Unicode and Character Sets

When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP
has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues,
blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near
impossible to develop good international web applications,
I thought, enough is enough.

So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer
working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters,
character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm
going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in
a submarine. I swear I will.

 The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer
 Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and
 Character Sets (No Excuses!)

 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Joel Spolsky
spolsky at fogcreek.com

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