> Windows doesn't have Unicode? Are you sure you're not using Win95 by accident?

have you ever tried using characters outside the BMP? only a few programs handle them correctly, due to the fact that microsoft seems to think that the BMP is all there is.

> HTML certainly isn't hard to get right cross-platform, and doesn't require a bunch of extra libraries on the server to implement a networked GUI -- just some way to serve the page to the client. You could implement the controller as a CGI script. If you want, you can add in secure connections, access control lists, etc. -- and, best of all, no ssh needed! (Doing work over a ssh connection outside my lan generally makes me want to beat myself with a hammer.)
> Plus, it would be highly flexible: you could still wrap a fancy GUI around it if you were clever. It'd send POST data to the server (or if you had a multiple configuration, each server in the list) to update its search terms, and fetch new trips periodically.

so instead of using SSH, you'd try to use HTTP to do what SSH was designed to do? and why use HTML? why not just serve the results as plain text and use javascript to insert them into an HTML document? that way if you do wrap a fancy GUI around it you don't need to have HTML parsing in your GUI.