[Ohta]
: The problem is that ISO 10646/Unicode does not address the issue for
: displaying or comparing strings which contains more than a single
: "character".
Tell me, since when did any (international or national) character set
define either display or sorting behaviour? Does JIS X 0208 define
sorting order? Does ASCII? Do ASMO 449 (Arabic) or ISCII (Indian)
standards define display behaviour for what are clearly complex scripts?
The answer is no. None of them do.
No, while comparison would be important for NIR in general RFC 1521
says nothing about that.
But, RFC1521/1522 does require profiling-free code->glyph mapping even
in individual headers.
X.400 is OK not to provide character set information in its fields,
of course. So what?
The same answer applies to 10646:
it should not define either.
That's why 10646, as is, is no good for MIME.
Or, do you have any reason why 10646 is any good for MIME charset
without additional profiling information?
They are in the application domain.
They are at the bottom of the application domain.
Although interrelated,
such ancilliary work needs to be separated from the character set standard
itself, whose task is *only* to enumerate a set of characters assigned to
code points according to some encoding scheme, *and no more*.
How can you say you can design the bottom, 10646, without knowing
how the upper layers will be?
[Ohta]
: I designed ICODE exactly for such a purpose. How do you think about it?
I don't know anything about it. Perhaps you could send me a paper describing
it. [Metis Technology, Inc., 522 Atlantic Ave., Boston, MA 02210]. I would
be interested in looking at it from an academic perspective, but not from
any practical perspective since it won't go anywhere as a real standard.
I hope you see it with the *ENGINEERING* perspective.
I really hope you don't see it with the perspective of ISO-is-the-real-
and-the-only-standard.
[Ohta]
: But that was the job we expected to SC2.
Who are "we"?
Many. At the time before the first DIS was voted down, many people in
Japan and many people who developed MIME has expected so.
Perhaps *you* expected it, but you seemed
to neglect to inform SC2 that that is what their charter should have been.
The charter was that "to develop the universal character set".
The result is "the universal character set" with the meaning of
"character" minimized and the meaning of "universal" undefined.
If you would bother to research the history of the charter of SC2/WG2 or of
SC2 in general you would find that your expectations wildly contradict
reality.
I'm proud of being my reality contradict with that of ISO.
Masataka Ohta