Blogger.com vs. Unicode

Congratulations Blogger fellows! You have totally forgotten Unicode in your new system. So not only new Persian bloggers can't use Blogger.com's free service any more, but also the old bloggers who have been using the old and not-so-Unicode-friendly system should move to somewhere else, because the new system does not support Unicode at all. The most probable ones are those websites that are being operated from inside Iran and are very vulnerable to political decisions by Iranian government to crack down on the Net.

It's really interesting, because almost all of the well-known encodings are supported by the new Blogger, except for Unicode. Haven't they heard about such a thing at all? The funny thing is that it is so wierd and surprising that some Irnians who commented on my recent post about it in my Persian weblog, beleive that Blogger has done it intentionaly to make Persian webloggers leave their system. Some have even gone further and related it to the corrupt former-president of Iran, Akbar Rafsanjani, and said that maybe he had paid Blogger to stop serving Persian speaking people.

I am sure there is no political reason behind the absence of Unicode in Blogger's new system. But it's so strange for Iranians that they make up these funny rumors.

Update: Bringing the protest to higher levels in the blogosphere is always effective. Jeff's post on this problem has made Evan Williams, Blogger's boss, mention that unicode will be a part of the final release of new Blogger. Thank you Evan for still being a blogger, not a businessman.