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Re: 20050418: when will HDF5 support Unicode?

> Dear Ed,
>
> I am one person pushing for Unicode support. It certainly annoys me
> that I cannot type my colleagues' addresses, or even names, correctly
> in a wide range of software. E.g. Mto-France and Espaa, never mind the
> guys in Russia or China.
>
> At least now on the standard desktops (Linux, Windows, Mac) and
> applications (Email, browsers, word processors, PowerPoint, etc) and
> even mobile phones, internationalisation has happened, though in my
> experience, database support for internationalisation is patchy.
>
> I am aware of the difficulties in handling code pages, national
> character sets, encodings, etc, and long ago came to the conclusion
> that the only sustainable solutions were either "ASCII" or Unicode
> (whether UTF-8 or UCS-2, etc). Anything in-between is piecemeal and
> problematic.
>
> My concern over the current developments of HDF and NetCDF is that
> proper internationalisation could end up being postponed for several
> years, even though the formats are widely used for international data
> exchange.
>
> Consequently, I asked, if Unicode could not be fully supported, at
> least the design decisions envisage it would be added eventually, and
> no unnecessary barriers would be inadvertently constructed. Hopefully,
> any areas where the "1 character = 8 bits" assumptions are made would
> be ring-fenced or labelled.
>
> HTH, Chris
>
> Chris Little  IT Customer Service & Performance Manager
> Met Office  FitzRoy Road  Exeter  Devon  EX1 3PB  United Kingdom
> Tel: +44(0)1392 886278  Fax: +44(0)870 900 5050  Mobile: +44(0)7753 880514
> E-mail: address@hidden  http://www.metoffice.gov.uk
>

Hello Chris,

I've passed your email on to those who make the feature prioritization
decisions for netcdf.

Thanks,

Ed


-- 
Ed Hartnett  -- address@hidden