> Completely ignoring the problem and leaving it up to applications further up the stack just ensures that there will be incompatible competing standards for how to tell applications how to decode the string data they get from the OS.

I think it's naive to think Operating Systems aren't going to fragment in order to offer "features" (and lockin), and then papering over all that fragmentation has to happen in the application anyway.

unless there's a standard, and if there's a standard the application itself can deal with it.