RE: UTF8

["denis bider" <ietf-ssh%denisbider.com@localhost>]

> I'm under the impression that those windows systems all use 
> utf-8, not different character sets on different systems or 
> for different users. Then, they don't matter, because they 
> don't have a problem. Right?

Windows is a dual-mode platform.

Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 natively use 16-bit Unicode, but the vast majority
of system APIs also come in so-called ANSI versions, which convert between
internal Unicode representation and, on the application side, whatever code
page is currently selected by the user or for the system. These code pages
are usually 8-bit but, as used in Asia in particular, they also include
multi-byte character sets (MBCS) with variable-length code sequences.

Windows 98/Me, a number of installations of which still persist, are
natively 8-bit and use internally whatever code page is configured for the
machine. Many system calls have a Unicode counterpart which translates the
strings to and from the internal 'ANSI' representation, but the windowing
subsystem (the graphical user interface) is totally ANSI and, on these
platforms, has no support for Unicode.

All versions of Windows from 98 and up provide a system character set
conversion API function which supports conversion to and from UTF-8. But the
internally used character set depends on the platform (16-bit Unicode for NT
platforms, or an 8-bit or variable-bit code page in Windows 9x/Me).