On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 11:08 +0600, Pavel Menshchikov wrote:

>
> Hello David and Willie,
>
> And could you use GB_2312 (simplified Chinese) character set and
> collation instead of unicode?
>
>
> HTH

There may be legal issue too. Recently a law was passed in China that
all software distributed within China must conform to a specific
standard (I don't recall the standard). On the Firebird-architects
list, one of the UTF8 critics came to the conclusion that UTFx support
was a necessity when he reviewed that standard - BG_2312 would not do.

Microsoft had to make major OS changes to support the standard, and
those changes are not entirely stable yet. I cannot speak to its
transparency from the applications perspective.

But, the big killer is that the app must support both English and
chinese concurrently to start. UTF8 provides this support whereas other
cod page based solutions do not.