Well, in that sense, UNICODE has nothing to do with Europe,
you should consider it U.S. as it was invened by a number
of big firms in the USA. I do not think it is of great use in Europe.
8-bit charsets would do most of what is needed for quite some time
to come here. Europe was quite sceptical to it when it was proposed.
When discussing UNICODE/10646 in Danish Standards circles, we
normally say that the real use of UNICODE is for Japan and China,
but then I know that you and other Japanese disagree strongly on that.
Reality check:
Most Americans don't care diddly about UNICODE. ASCII is perfectly
sufficient for most of the population here, and nearly everyone else
would be perfectly happy with 8859/1.
UNICODE was invented on behalf of American *software* vendors who want
to build products that they can sell all over the world. From a software
marketing point of view, this makes sense: you don't have to develop
a different product for each country, so you can sell to more markets
at lower cost.
The UNICODE people were aware of the difficulties involved, and did a
lot of research to try to make their product as palatable as possible,
while still fitting the result in a reasonable amount of ROM space.
This involved a lot of very difficult compromises.
Despite all of this hard work, some people don't like the result. I
see their point. If I were Japanese, I probably wouldn't want a UNICODE
based product either.
There's also a basic rule in human nature. People don't like having
decisions that affect them, made without their being consulted.
Mind you, it's pretty difficult to consult everyone who might want to
use UNICODE, but that doesn't keep those who weren't consulted from
being pissed off about it.
If what we are seeing here is any indication, UNICODE isn't going to
be as successful as its designers hoped. So the people who don't like
it can take heart. Perhaps if people don't buy software that's based
on UNICODE, the designers will work hard to correct the problem in
the next version. Perhaps they are already at work doing so.
But *if* the problems are to be corrected, it won't happen because
people argued about them on the info-mime list.
So I'll kindly suggest that those who wish to complain about UNICODE,
(or to insult particular countries) do so elsewhere. Such comments
can serve no useful purpose here.
Keith