John Klensin writes:
The real
discussion in this case is that "10646" [appears to*] "claim" that Hindi
and Sanskrit use the same character set (plus maybe some characters at
the edges that appear in one or the other but not both). The same
"claim" is made for Japanese and Chinese.
There are probably purposes for which this claim is appropriate.
They include more or less crude renderings where the goal is to have
something that is "close enough" that a human reader with some tolerance
and flexibility can figure out what is intended
I've only quoted a part of John's message, but the whole thing was
very well said, in my opinion. Just superb.
Lately I've been wondering if it would be OK to see Unicode itself as
corresponding to MIME's "text/plain", and to see an extended Unicode
(i.e. language tagging and/or font tagging) as corresponding to
"richtext" (or one of its successors).
That way, we may be able to keep both sides happy. Then again, people
like Masataka would probably insist upon differentiating Han even in
plain text.
This discussion will continue for some time...
Erik