The CSI Approach

Codeset Independence allows application and platform software developers to keep their code independent of encoding, such as UTF-8, and also provides the ability to adopt any new encoding without having to modify the source code. This architecture approach differs from Java internationalization in that Java requires applications to be Unicode-dependent and also requires code conversions throughout the application.

Many existing internationalized applications (for example, Motif) automatically inherit CSI support from the underlying system. These applications work in the new locales without modification. OPEN LOOK applications, however, that are XView/OLIT based, don't work in the new locales because XView is codeset-dependent.

CSI is inherently independent from any codesets. However, the following assumptions on file code encodings (codesets) still apply to Solaris 7:

• File code is a superset of ASCII.

  Unicode (16-bits fixed width) cannot be supported as file code.

• NULL (0x00) is not part of multibyte characters for support of null-terminated multibyte character strings.

• Slash / (0x2f) is not part of multibyte characters for support of the UNIX path names.

• Only stateless file code encodings are supported.