With this all this heated and emotional debate, it seems that some people have
lost sight of the issue. I for one don't remember what it was. It seems
like the phrase "Unicode is a true international charset" has become fighting
words for some members of this group. Not intending to fan the flames, I would
like to put in my 2.5 cents.
Here is the problem as I see it:
Group A: Unicode is good enough because you can represent most every character
of most every language in 16 bits. Great for bandwidth.
Group B: Unicode is not usable because you cannot tell Chinese from
Japanese from Korean.
From the arguments posted by both groups it seems to me that Unicode is not
a "charset" but a character encoding which encodes characters from a specific
exclusive set of languages. ie. (European + Chinese) or (European + Japanese)
without too much undesirable loss of language information. Assuming that
one can figure out different European languages from context. Now the
difficulty with unicode lies in the fact that it doesn't differentiate between
Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters or some European characters which while
seeming similar in form or meaning maybe presented differently by Chinese,
Japanese or Korean speakers or French and German speakers and in fact gives
them the same code point. This "unification" is unacceptable to some, maybe
the majority, of the people who wish to mix Chinese, Japanese and Korean text
in their everyday EMail messages.
So perhaps we could define different charsets for Chinese, Japanese and Korean
using the unicode encoding. And perhap a "meta" charset that uses an
ISO-2022'ish method for switching between them.
examples:
Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=unicode
Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=unicode-chinese
Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=unicode-japanese
Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=unicode-korean
Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=unicode-everything
Use the "unicode" charset when you don't care how the message looks.
Use the "unicode-chinese" when the message contains Chinese and so on.
I would like to see discussions about actual proposals instead of this arguing
and bickering.
Mark Keasling
makr(_at_)twinsun(_dot_)com