The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Unicode and estonian

Hi!

> Did you ever get an email from your friends
> in Estonia with the subject line "???? ?????? ??? ????"?

just a remark - estonian mostly uses ASCII, there are only a few accented characters. if you you get an e-mail from in estonian, and the subject line looks '????? ???? ????? ??' then you probably have something badly wrong with your e-mail software ..

and another note .. look at http://www.skype.com/ as an example of a good unicode-enabled software ;)

regards,
kaido
(a programmer from Estonia)

Kaido Kärner
Saturday, October 11, 2003

I said it was a friend "in Estonia" but I didn't say what language he spoke :)

Joel Spolsky
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Joel's showing his MS roots... [grin]

Philo

Philo
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Hi!

Hee Joel, that can really be, there is pretty big russian community here in Estonia ...

kaido

Kaido Kärner
Saturday, October 11, 2003

I changed it so people don't accuse me of not knowing about Estonia, which is now trying to pass itself off as "practically Scandanavia" :) Isn't Tallinn closer to Helsinki than anywhere in Russia?

Joel Spolsky
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Joel,

you're right Tallinn is only 84km away from Helsinki (17 minutes on helicopter) and 220km away from Russian border.

Nevertheless, thank you for writing this article and publishing it on your respected site. I guess, most of non-English speaking programming world are already familiar with those basics, but it's a great help for English speaking developers some of whom still wrongly believe that "everyone kinda speaks English". So it sounds like a good "wake up" call to everyone. Sadly 95% of widely used software is written in America (IT paradise), where people are least aware of internationalization issues.

At last, I must admit being a bit suprised when you wrote this, for mis-interpretation of encodings was biggest issue with CityDesk v1.0, which is now solved, thanks for that.

Vlad
Monday, October 13, 2003