Forums Feature Suggestions Unicode?

I've seen on a very old thread that Unicode support is planned. However, there does not seem to be any trace of it yet. How long till Unicode will finally be implemented? (I'm not asking for an exact date, I know that's probably not possible to say, but is it likely to be completed within the next year? Or will it be another decade?...)

I love you.

However, I don't think even Khaled can know this. Unicode support with the Windows we (actually, make that "you") have today would require the use of a translation table, as mentioned in the thread below, because it's not properly implemented in Windows.

To add charset translation, especially detecting what charsets are being input in the first place, can be quite hard. I've seen this done, though, so it could be implemented in mIRC as well.

I don't agree that a basic Unicode implementation needs anything as complicated as detecting character sets. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by 'it's not properly implemented in Windows'. It is in Windows 2000 and XP.

I'm pretty sure not too many people will complain if mIRC made use of Windows 2000's/XP's built-in Unicode support. Although this may seem like discriminating Win95/98/ME users, it's actually done that way in almost any Unicode application nowadays. It can be done in such a way that Win95/98/ME users can still use the legacy character sets.

Secondly, I don't think there's any need to detect charsets. It should suffice if you tell mIRC what charset to send messages in and what charset to interpret incoming messages as. If someone uses, say, Latin-2, then surely you can just tell mIRC to interpret it as Latin-2 (while encouraging the other person to upgrade to a Unicode-aware IRC client ;-) ). It wouldn't mind if this was done on a per-channel (rather, per-window) basis first, and only per-nick later.

Seeing as mIRC is the most popular IRC client world-wide, UTF-8 implementation in mIRC will pretty certainly significantly drive forward the implementation of UTF-8 in other clients; before you know it, it's considered IRC standard and everyone will be expected to use it.

As long as mIRC maintains compatibility with 95/98/ME I don't see a problem. mIRC already does this, 9x doesn't support transparency for example, only 2k/XP/2003 do, yet mIRC still supports it. Oh also NT4 and 2003 have built in unicode support as well, so they would be able to work with it too, not just 2k/XP.

Thank you for the updated info, timwi. This is certainly good news, especially for those of us who already use Unicode, and want our mIRC-using friends to experience it as well. Since I often switch between using Japanese, English and Norwegian, this would make things a whole lot easier.