Re: FWD FYI: is ISO-2022-CN actually used?

Hi Markus,

Our Messaging Server supports the charset and, although we don't have any
data on what percentage of emails are encoded in that charset, in order to
maintain compatibility we need to continue supporting it as long as the
charset continues to be in use, even if by a small community of users.

Our architecture requires the server to decode the data contained in
emails coming from *any* (reasonably standard) email client in use
worldwide. If for example an old some Chinese university mailing list
system sends email in that charset to users of our Messaging Server, and
ICU did not support it, then the emails would appear as garbage to these
users. We would be forced to maintain the charset in our own copy of ICU,
although the reason to use ICU in the first place is not to maintain our
own code. Our customers will not accept that we don't support standard
charsets just because a minority of users needs them (we have a hard
enough time as it is to explain to them we can't support things which
grossly violate the standards). Thanks,

Fred

>------------- Begin Forwarded Message -------------
>
>Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 16:36:01 -0800
>From: Markus Scherer <[email protected]>
>Subject: is ISO-2022-CN actually used?
>To: icu list <[email protected]>, icu4c-support list 
><[email protected]>
>MIME-version: 1.0
>Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
>X-Accept-Language: en, de, eo
>
>Question: Is the ISO-2022-CN or ISO-2022-CN-EXT charset for Chinese actually 
>used significantly?
>
>I am aware that there is a significant user base for ISO-2022-JP and its 
>subvariants (for Japanese).
>
>I am aware that there are numerous implementations of ISO-2022-CN converters.
>
>However, I would like to know if ISO-2022-CN is actually used, or if Chinese 
>users and their 
>software rather use other charsets like GB 2312, GBK, GB 18030, Big 5, EUC-CN, 
>EUC-TW, HZ.
>
>Do you have anecdotal evidence from what Chinese versions and competitors of 
>Hotmail, AOL, etc. do 
>for email/SMTP charsets for Chinese?
>
>Do you know of any source of statistics for this kind of question?
>
>Thank you very much,
>markus
>
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>------------- End Forwarded Message -------------
>
>