(keitai-l) Re: European i-mode

From: Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net>
Date: 03/22/02
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.43.0203221722500.7900-100000@angelic.cynic.net>
On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Gustaf Rosell wrote:

> The character set for international i-mode is to become UTF-8.

Cool. Unfortunately, web sites in Japan are going to have to deliver
Shift_JIS for years, to remain compatable with old phones. Whether
they will gear up to provide UTF-8 instead to those phones that
are capable of it, I don't know. But knowing the Japanese; I rather
doubt it; they don't seem to care much about making Japanese-language
Internet content work well outside of Japan. (The widespread lack
of character-set-encoding specifications on Japanese web pages is
a case in point.)

Actually, I suppose the gateways could always convert for the old
phones.

> Currently it is actually partly an issue of typefaces in the phones and how
> to handle emoji/accessskeys figures.

I'd think this isn't a big problem; Unicode does have a vendor-specific
area for things like this. Or who knows; if European i-Mode is also
offering these characters and take-up is as good there as it was
in Japan, these would likely be added to a future version of the
Unicode standard.

> For international i-mail, it is already UTF-8.

Cool. I hope one day that docomo fixes their gateway to accept and
convert UTF-8, as it does with ISO-2022-JP and EUC-JP. Right now
UTF-8 e-mail produces mojibaka, or at least it did when I just
tried it.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs_at_cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC
Received on Fri Mar 22 10:48:26 2002