Keola Donaghy's Culture Hack

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Dan asks some valid questions, and Dave offers some solid answers. I really didn't get into it when I abandoned Manila for our weblog projects, but the lack of UTF-8 support (and no indication that it would ever happen) was the main reason I had to do it, and the reason why someday I'll probably abandon Radio as well. Dave's reasons are prefectly valid. However, was releasing it under GPL really expected to remedy these shortcomings? Perhaps there was a real expectation that someone would pick up the mantle, carry on and modernize the kernel. Perhaps it will still happen.

More and more of my online projects will require that they be completely in Hawaiian, and typing UTF8 escape sequences everytime I type a diacritic is way too much work. Same goes for Irish. Mac OS has complete support for Hawaiian and Irish in Unicode, as does Irish. Windows does too, albeit with a few minor tweaks.

It's nice that the kernel and Usertalk are powerful enough to handle all of the innovations that Dave and others have done on top of that code base. But is it a stack of cards that eventually will come tumbing down when some unforseen limit of the kernal is reached? <shrugs>

Posted at 12:54:50 PM