On Tuesday, February 25, 2003, at 02:22  AM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> One problem with moving to ISO-8859-1 is that you lose several pleasant
> characters that are useful for writing English, notably left and right
> single and double quotation marks and a couple of dashes.

These characters are not at all pleasant unless you happen to run 
Windows.

The show up as garbage on more web pages and produce parsing errors in 
many programs including XML and C parsers.

They are not pleasant at all.

That said - the ISO-8859-X line of character encodings is rightfully 
considered to be a family of legacy encodings.  What would be ideal 
would be to support UTF-8 in the file system and whatever we like 
internally.  UTF-8 has the nice property of being binary compatible 
with most things that deal with ascii.

FWIW, if we are looking for a library to take on internationalization - 
may I recommend IBM's International Components for Unicode - open 
source library.  There is a C library and an equivalent Java lib.  This 
is the source of Java's internationalization capabilities BTW.

http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/

-Todd Blanchard