Chinese URL

If you look at the two post of chinese poems I made yesterday, you will notice that instead of the usual title of the post used to name the blog postings, these two posts were given generic names.

This is due largely to the limitation of the current generation of web browsers. They are unable to handle URL that are in unicode. More importantly, Microsoft Internet Explorer which holds 90% of the market share cannot support unicode URL. Even in IE7, where they revamped the whole URI engine, they are not committed yet to support unicode URL.

Microsoft always says that they must be allow to innovate in order to benefit the consumers. And they are in the perfect position to do so since they hold the majority market share for operating system, office application and web browser.

Yet they are unable to update their software to support standards that have been around for ages to allow consumer to ripe the benefits. Eg. CSS2, IPv6. They take five years to come up with a new version of Windows, during this time the Linux kernel has been updated multiple times, MacOS jumped from OS9 to OSX and Appled released 4 versions of OSX during this time. I have been using tabbed browser for nearly three years now. IE7, which will be release late this year, will finally support tabs.

Sometime, I think that if the American judge has ordered Microsoft to be split into two or three, Microsoft might be a lot better now. Maybe we will be using IEx by now. :D