China's Open Document Format Fight

eldavojohn writes "While there's been a lot of talk of the open document formats in the states, China is facing the same dilemma. A ZDNet blog examines the issue by pointing out they will most likely merge their current standard with either OOXML or ODF. The bulk of their post points out why OOXML shouldn't be ISO certified and is the biggest problem for Microsoft's standard: 'Another Standard, Microsoft does not support, is the specification RFC 3987, which defines UTF-8 capable Internet addresses. Consequently, OOXML does not support, to use Chinese characters within a Web address.' This would be problematic for many languages, not just Chinese."

Comments

Cannot Merge With OOXML

[Citizen of Earth]

they will most likely merge their current standard with either OOXML or ODF

The tiniest bit of analysis will lead them to conclude that it is technically impossible to merge their format with OOXML, since OOXML is not adequately defined.

Unicode URLs

[bursch-X]

utf-8 URLs never caught on in Japan, actually URLs never caught on here. You can see much more people typing "google" or even "" in the search box in their Yahoo (!) default landing page, than typing the URL google.com (BTW Yahoos market share here is overwhelming).

Japanese just don't type URLs they use Yahoo for searching. Many don't even use bookmarks. They just search. It's probably because they have a hard time remembering foreign name URLs in Roman letters, which except for "design" purposes don't play much of a role in Japan. It's much easier to type a japanese search term into a search box than remembering an alphabet resemblance of the same as a URL (there are two main ways of transcribing Japanese into the latin alphabets and everyone is intermixing them, so there's much unclarity about the "proper" roman letter spelling of words).

Even print advertisements nowadays, rather than putting the company URL in big letters, they tend to have a little graphic depicting a search box and a button and give you a Japanese search term you're supposed to put in your Yahoo or Google search box.