Forums Feature Suggestions UTF-8 support

hmm
yes, that IS understandable, but...
it should have all been in UTF-8 from the very beginning. There would be no bashing about it today if it were done in UTF-8 nine years ago. However, Khaled must not have thought about it. People didn't care about I18N these days as they do now...
We all know that mIRC is the most popular IRC client on earth nowadays. THAT makes the point. Rounin probably doesn't even use mIRC. And the reason for him to be bashing is quite simple - he cannot use UTF-8 of what his IRC client is capable just because, say, 90% of other users won't understand it. And, say, 90% of those 90% are using mIRC. That is the reason. Currently, for most of the advanced users (those who know difference between mIRC and IRC), mIRC is a curse. It's not really good when one app controls too much of the market. We have that with MSIE, which interprets the standards in its own way, and now it looks like we have same stuff with mIRC. Why oh why do I have to depend on priorities in Khaled's to-do list? I'm not using mIRC, but i'm strongly tied with limitations of mIRC just because it's that popular! It's unfair! That's why I'm bashing about it. That's why people are bashing about it.

UTF-8 was created in late '92, mIRC v2.1a was released early '95, and who knows how long Khaled had been working to get up to 2.1a before that. It took 10 years for most programs to really turn towards UTF-8/16 I hardly think that you can fault mIRC for not supporting it before practically anything else did.


- MSIE and mIRC have a vitally important difference; mIRC obtained it's overwhelming majority of the IRC client market by being the best client for the users, Microsoft got the browser market for IE by slapping it in with their OS which already controlled the desktop computer market and then breaking compatability with other browsers. The same is still true today, and with that in mind if you or anyone else thinks of mIRC as a curse there's one simple thing that they can do to change that - make a better IRC client. mIRC isn't interpreting standards in it's own way here, it simply lacks support for something, if anything that could be considered a blessing for those that don't like mIRC, finally something that they can have in their clients that mIRC doesn't.


- I don't see why that is. If you want you can use UTF-8 and then if others complain you can tell them why, then if they think UTF-8 is worth having they can always change clients. If something is going to be done it's going to be done. I don't think Khaled is sitting there twiddling his thumbs wondering whether today he should put UTF-8 support into mIRC or otherwise just add a new icon to the toolbar. I don't think he lacks the basic logic it takes to see that UTF-8 is an important and useful feature to have in an IRC client, do you? Assuming you don't I hope you can understand why I don't see why people insist on 'bashing about it' as you call it, it's not going to get the job done any faster.

Of course I can! But it would be pointless. I fully understand that in 1995 developers did not really care about Unicode, neither did most of them know it existed. I'm not blaming Khaled for missing this point. That was too common back then. In fact it's still quite common now.


IE was the best browser back then... Actually, a lot of people don't distinguish mIRC and IRC. They think that's the same. And a lot of irc'ers don't really know there are alternatives. I'm not saying mIRC is a bad IRC client. It's a good one. Really. However, there's a lot of good IRC clients out there. And most of them don't suport Unicode. And most of them won't support it until mIRC supports it. That's why we're so insistive on that. We just want mIRC to be better at this point.


Yeah, you're right about that. What we actually wanted was to affect Khaled's priorities in his to-do list. I hope, we did. No flaming anymore. peace.