From: Masataka Ohta
<mohta(_at_)necom830(_dot_)cc(_dot_)titech(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp>
Date: Mon, 27 Dec 93 18:04:49 JST
ISO 10646 is done. OK. It is a complete standard of "characters" with
its own definition of a "character". But it is incomplete as an text
encoding standard.
Since neither 10646 nor Unicode purport to be a "complete text encoding
standard", you are amiss in attributing this as a deficiency.
The problem is that ISO 10646/Unicode does not address the issue for
displaying or comparing strings which contains more than a single
"character".
It is rare that a MIME message contains only a single "character".
So, we need a standard encoding which can handle, at least, two
"character"s, and hopefully, as many "character"s as possible.
Note: "character" here means a character of ISO 10646.
10646
and Unicode are the foundation upon which one can indeed build a complete
text encoding standard (where text is understood as content, structure, and
appearance).
I know that many people (including myself) would like to see such a standard:
it would solve more of our problems.
Quite true. I designed ICODE exactly for such a purpose. How do you think
about it?
However, good engineering practice
dictates modularity, not monolithicness. 10646 and Unicode achieve the first
important step in the process towards this goal. To accuse them of failing
to solve all the problems of text encoding in general is a little bit naive
don't you think?
But that was the job we expected to SC2.
Masataka Ohta
PS
I will be on vacation till 1/4.