CSI Approach

Codeset independence enables application and platform software developers to keep their code independent of any 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^TM internationalization in that Java requires applications to be UTF-16–dependent.

Many existing internationalized applications (for example, Motif) automatically inherit CSI support from the underlying system. These applications work in the new locales without modification.

CSI is inherently independent from any codesets. However, the following assumptions about file code encodings (codesets) still apply to the Solaris 9 environment:

• File code is a superset of ASCII.

• NULL byte value (0x00) does not appear as part of multibyte character bytes for support of null-terminated multibyte character strings.

• ASCII Slash character byte value (0x2f) does not appear as part of multibyte character bytes for support of the UNIX path names.