

Joel Spolsky's explanation of Unicode - tRAS
http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

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kahawe
I have yet to work on a project where neither charsets nor line-endings ever
pop-up and cause problems... seeing as it is 2011, this is an absolutely
abysmal testimony for IT as a whole.

~~~
arnoooooo
Microsoft had/has a lot to do with that.

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dpark
How is it Microsoft's fault that the world couldn't agree on line-termination
or charset (especially charset, since there really was no reasonable option
before unicode)?

~~~
AutoCorrect
CR/LF. That's why.

~~~
dpark
That was one of the most popular line ending formats. According to Wikipedia,
the following non-MS-related all used CR\LF: DEC TOPS-10, RT-11, CP/M, MP/M,
Atari TOS, Symbian OS, Palm OS. Meanwhile Mac OS used just CR, as did the
Apple II, Commodore, Acorn BBC, and TRS-80. The only players that used LF were
Unix (and derivatives), BeOS, Amiga, and RISC OS.

It just happens that we ended up in a world where basically everything is Unix
or Windows, so Windows seems like the odd man out. But history tells a rather
different story. The use of CRLF was enshrined in RFC561 (the original email
RFC) in 1973, before Unix was popular.

