Re: HELO

>> 1) How is this different from -unicode?
>
> This list isn't specifically about Unicode, although it is a topic 
> which should
> surely come up quite a bit.

G11n/i18n encompass a lot more than Unicode. "Unicode is not enough". 
The gist being that to inter-operate with the myriad of systems in the 
world, an application must understand the encodings, time zones, and 
locality preferences for a location. By "preferences" here I don't mean 
application user preferences, I mean the manners by which a user in a 
location may prefer to use the application.

Unicode may be enough in a system which needn't operate with a 
non-Unicode system, by this seems unlikely in Perl's case, since the 
moment the app hits the web, it is interacting with web browsers.

Globalization is made significantly easier if Unicode is made standard 
throughout the application itself, so that all processing/object 
interaction/transformation/etc. is happening in Unicode. Application 
layers which interact with users, services, or other systems, however, 
must understand non-Unicode if those users/services/systems user other 
encodings. This is the "Application Encoding Sandwich", having the 
innards all speaking strictly Unicode, and the 'outards' being 
responsible to get their data into Unicode. The outards can end up 
pretty complicated in this scenario, since in many cases they need to do 
much more than convert encodings. Consider e-mail, where non-ASCII 
headers get base64 or qprint encoded, and in some cases don't even 
identify their own encodings.

Globalization is an appropriate title for the effort, since you quickly 
get the feeling you are solving the world's problems. :-) If only 
Unicode were universally adapted ...

- Dan