Clipboard/Selection Target Types

[Keith Packard]

Around 14 o'clock on Jan 4, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Windows is UTF-16 so some cross platform apps seem to be written with
> UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 at core. Of course the conversion is trivial.
> There is certainly some appeal to simply making all UNIX protocols use
> UTF-8 so only the sender not the receiver potentially needs to convert.

Yes, using a single encoding is very desirable as a simpler standard should
reduce the number of problems in each implementation, especially when
interoperating with foreign software.

UTF-8 has the advantage of being byte-order independent, which is highly 
beneficial in our heterogeneous world, hence a better choice for an 
inter-application exchange format.

-keith