Old standards never die, they just fester in a closet. Look at EBCDIC. Still used for terminals in businesses. Look in a Wards or a Home Depot. They're everywhere.
Teacher: "So the government wanted IBM to make an encryption standard, and IBM did. It was named..." Student: "EBCDIC?"
Utf-8 is the name of the set of all characters formed by the lower 8 bits of unicode, which are all the ascii characters. Since unicode is a variable length encoding, utf-8 can look exactly like ascii to an ascii machine. The best part is that utf-8 requires no change. All ascii programs can read utf-8 and all utf-8 programs can read ascii. So therefore all unicode programs can read and write ascii. And all ascii programs can read and write a unicode subset. To top it off, if a file does use the extended unicode stuff (>8 bits) then it will just look like line noise to an ascii machine, and a normal document in whatever language to a unicode machine. The file size increase wont happen for ascii characters, but an additional 8 bits is needed for extended characters. In conclusion, Unicode will completely replace ascii, and almost no one (in english speaking countries at least) will notice.:)
Example: ascii A == 65. or 1000001 unicode/utf-8 A == 65, or 1000001. There wont be any problems here.:)
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Damn. I can never trust what I read on the internet. I still think UTF-8 is cool. :)
Old standards never die, they just fester in a closet.
Look at EBCDIC. Still used for terminals in businesses. Look in a Wards or a Home Depot. They're everywhere.
Teacher: "So the government wanted IBM to make an encryption standard, and IBM did. It was named..."
Student: "EBCDIC?"
Utf-8 is the name of the set of all characters formed by the lower 8 bits of unicode, which are all the ascii characters. :)
:)
Since unicode is a variable length encoding, utf-8 can look exactly like ascii to an ascii machine.
The best part is that utf-8 requires no change. All ascii programs can read utf-8 and all utf-8 programs can read ascii. So therefore all unicode programs can read and write ascii. And all ascii programs can read and write a unicode subset.
To top it off, if a file does use the extended unicode stuff (>8 bits) then it will just look like line noise to an ascii machine, and a normal document in whatever language to a unicode machine.
The file size increase wont happen for ascii characters, but an additional 8 bits is needed for extended characters.
In conclusion, Unicode will completely replace ascii, and almost no one (in english speaking countries at least) will notice.
Example:
ascii A == 65. or 1000001
unicode/utf-8 A == 65, or 1000001.
There wont be any problems here.