On Mon, 01 Mar 1993 14:26:06 EST, Mark A Keasling said:
Group A: Unicode is good enough because you can represent most every charac
ter
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.
Group A: ASCII is good enough because you can represent most every
character of most common languages in 7 bits. Great for bandwidth.
Group B: ASCII is not usable because you can't tell French from
German from Spanish.
We went ahead and standardizes ASCII anyhow.
Disclaimer: I personally think Unicode is the wrong solution,
but see no reason why we can't standardize it for use between
consenting adults on consenting systems. The IETF even has
a category called "Optional Standard" where there is *no*
requirement that a system support a given service, but *if*
such a service is supported, *this* is the way it should be done.
'Nuf said.
Valdis Kletnieks
Computer Systems Engineer
Virginia Tech